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.

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

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

I read books to read myself.

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

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

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.