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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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].