One reason we have children I think is to learn that parts of ourselves we had given up for dead are merely dormant and that the old joys can re emerge fresh and new and in a completely different form.

When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading. He did not stir. They placed a straw hat on his head. No response. Only when they took away the wooden chair on which he was sitting did he, as he puts it, 'wake out of the book'.

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.

You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.

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

I have never been able to resist a book about books.