For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.
If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering – naked and alone.
Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown ‘girl’ would probably be transformed into a’woman’.
E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.
It is a truism of epistolary psychology that, for example, a Christmas thank-you note written on December 26 can say any old thing, but if you wait until February, you are convinced that nothing less than Middlemarch will do.
To use an electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you’ve only pressed Pause.
A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker.
I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one’s life wearing a typo.
Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.
Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.
The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
I’d rather have a book, but in a pinch I’ll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions.
Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure.
I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one.
Some friends of theirs had rented their house for several months to an interior decorator. When they returned, they discovered that their entire library had been reorganized by color and size. Shortly thereafter, the decorator met with a fatal automobile accident. I confess that when this story was told, everyone around the dinner table concurred that justice had been served.
If you can’t see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else’s culture?
Some day, as soon as a book is printed it will be simultaneously put into digital form. That will be a wonderful research tool, but it will never substitute for holding the book. I feel certain that at least within my lifetime, everyone will still be going to the bookstore and buying printed books. Thank God I’ll die before I have to worry about whether the printed book itself will disappear. That’s something I don’t want to live to see.
George, if you ever break the spine of one of my books, I want you to know that you might as well be breaking my own spine.