Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game.

Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.

Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain.

Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.