All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.

Speech is the voice of the heart.

I go online all the time, I just don't read about myself. I read a fashion website called Go Fug Yourself. I actually correspond with the Fug Girls and that's great.

I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.

My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.