The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.

When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.

Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.

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

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.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.