A couple's first task, it has always seemed to me, is to solve the problem of breakfast; if this can be worked out amicably, most other difficulties can too.

Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.

Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

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 best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.

In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.