A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.

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

To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one's essential position [in life].

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

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

Poetry springs directly from our primal need and capacity for communication[Poetry] mobilizes such a concentration of devices, such an intensification of language via rhythm, syntax, image and metaphor. Reading it-the best of it-can create another, very different kind of perpetual present, an awareness that can be as ongoing in the soul as the stop-time of trauma.

A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.