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.

The more I like a book, the more reluctant I am to turn the page. Lovers, even book lovers, tend to cling. No one-night stands or "reads" for them.

The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.

The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.

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

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

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