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.

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

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].

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.

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.