For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.

The book can't compete with the screen. It couldn't compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn't compete with the television screen and it can't compete with the computer screen I don't think. And now we have all those screens so against all those screens I think the book can't measure up.

--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others

Teaching ... particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walking up Broadway in Manhattan talking to yourself, except instead of eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to yourself, they're all in the room. They know, like, nothing.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.