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].

If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents.

Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don't just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity. The printed page becomes a kind of wrought-iron fence we crawl through, returning, once we have wandered, to the very place we started.

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

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

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

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