It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us - it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.

Far away, in the meadow, shadows flickered in the Mirror's Maze, as if parts of someone's life, yet unborn, were trapped there, waiting to be lived.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college.

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.