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

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.

I read books to read myself.

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.

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.