Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.

Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?

Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?

When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.

Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.