Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

I don't personally like the e-readers they've come up with so far. I don't fetishize books, but I do like that they're solid and unchanging.

It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.

I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.

You're either reading a book or you're not.