a. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.

Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.

Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom?

Old saws have no teeth.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.

Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.