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

Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.

There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.

Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live. There is in men, as Peter Quennell said, "a centrifugal tendency." In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.

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

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

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.