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.

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].

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

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

I read books to read myself.

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.

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