The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.

The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.

Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.