You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.

E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.

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

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

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

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'.

A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker.