I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.

Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

celebrate while you can

Henry David Thoreau is very independent-minded, very iconoclastic, and had quite a corrosive sense of humor. I think that I probably have grown up to have a Thoreauvian perspective on many things. Though in other ways I live a life he would not have approved of. He believed to simplify, simplify, simplify. Make your life very clear and plain and meditative and not confused. Sometimes my life, in fact, is confused.

You don't have to understand why anything that has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains.

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.