The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.

In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness…It’s not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.

A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.

To choose a writer for a friend is like palling around with your cardiologist, who might be musing as you talk to him that you are a sinking man. A writer's love for another writer is never quite free of malice. He may enjoy discussing your failures even more than you do. He probably sees you as tragic, like his characters - or unworthy of tragedy, which is worse.

For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.

We don't simply read books. We become them.