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

I read books to read myself.

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

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.

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

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

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