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

A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.

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.

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity.

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.