But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.

What matters to me is that one identifies one's genuine obsessions, one's genuine commitments, one's genuine appetites, one pursues them seriously and far.

Dilettantism is the sort of thing one must avoid.

There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.

There are moral religious people and moral secular people, immoral religious people and immoral secular people.

Incorruptibility by money is the old story... Now it's incorruptibility by media.

No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.