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'.

I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.

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

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

You can miss a lot by sticking to the point.

I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.

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