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.

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.

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

Some day, as soon as a book is printed it will be simultaneously put into digital form. That will be a wonderful research tool, but it will never substitute for holding the book. I feel certain that at least within my lifetime, everyone will still be going to the bookstore and buying printed books. Thank God I'll die before I have to worry about whether the printed book itself will disappear. That's something I don't want to live to see.

When I write after dark", observed Cyril Connolly, "the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose

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

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