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

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 never been able to resist a book about books.

Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.

One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.

The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.

when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says Private - grownups keep out: a children sprawled on the bed, reading.