My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.

I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.

If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.

Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.

Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.

Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure

...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.