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

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

It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.

If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown 'girl' would probably be transformed into a'woman'.

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.

I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.

Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.