Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.

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

It is a truism of epistolary psychology that, for example, a Christmas thank-you note written on December 26 can say any old thing, but if you wait until February, you are convinced that nothing less than Middlemarch will do.

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.

If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone

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

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.