By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one

Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.

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

We prefer to think that the absence of inverted commas guarantees the originality of a thought, whereas it may be merely that the utterer has forgotten its source.

To take wine into your mouth is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.

There is no reader so parochial as the one who reads none but this morning's books. Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn.

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.