When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.

WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.

I'm a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'.

Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?

To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.