I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks

I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive.

While reading writers of great formulatory power — Henry James, Santayana, Proust — I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C’mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer’s cramp while reading.

I know how deeply slothful I am.

I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.

Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.

No nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain.