Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find.

The argument, now, is about whether Bolshevik Russia was 'better' than Nazi Germany. In the days when the New Left dawned, the argument was about whether Bolshevik Russia was better than America.

More will mean worse.

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.

Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.

It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom your father left her for.