The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

Real reading is a lonely activity.

Reading well makes children more interesting both to themselves and others, a process in which they will develop a sense of being separate and distinct selves.