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.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.

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

The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.

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.