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.

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

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

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.

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.

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