..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.

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.

When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?

Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

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

You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people's eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.