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

Seriously, I do not know what to say of this book [ Absalom, Absalom!] except that it seem to point to the final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent… this is a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks. The characters have no magnitude and no meaning because they have no more reality than a mince-pie nightmare.

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

I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly