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].

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

I read books to read myself.

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

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.

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?