the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one's life.

It is passivity that dulls feeling.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

Most of my reading is rereading.

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

whatever doesn't kill you leaves scars.