I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word.

If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.

The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. ‘There’ was then; ‘here’ is now.

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.