For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.

You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.

...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.

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

It is a truism of epistolary psychology that, for example, a Christmas thank-you note written on December 26 can say any old thing, but if you wait until February, you are convinced that nothing less than Middlemarch will do.

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one.

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.