I read passionately with a need to know and see the act of reading as an act of cognition and not simply a means of passing time.

If on a friend’s bookshelf You cannot find Joyce or Sterne Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton, You are in danger, face the fact, So kick him first or punch him hard And from him hide behind a curtain.

Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc.

Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.

I thought... their elegance... lies not so much in their clothes as in their bodies, and their bodies have received it, and continue to unceasingly receive it, from their souls, which are just like yours, lovely Simonetta.

Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative of accomplishing nothing.

I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason.