One's first book, kiss, home run is always the best.

Name me any liquid — except our own blood — that flows more intimately and incessantly through the labyrinth of symbols we have conceived to mark our status as human beings, from the rudest peasant festival to the mystery of the Eucharist.

What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.

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.

My main recollection is of the work I had to do in order to eat

A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs.

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