We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

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

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.

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

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