Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.

Reading is not an operation performed on something inert but a relationship entered into with another vital being.

Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.

I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.

A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

If you want to feel at home, stay home.