I am more or less reading all the time.

I've never given up. I've always kept going. I don't feel that I could afford to give up. That would be the beginning of the end.

What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.

Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.

By the way of connecting with subject, with theme, I was able to find a kind of lifeline. Writing's like a lifeline. You have to get the right way in. Otherwise the material just lies there, and you can't do anything with it.

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.