The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.
There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.
An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I’ve read.
We don’t simply read books. We become them.
Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
Chic is a convent for unloved women.
There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.
In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people’s lives.
A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.
Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.
We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader’s teeth.
The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.
The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.
The more I like a book, the more reluctant I am to turn the page. Lovers, even book lovers, tend to cling. No one-night stands or “reads” for them.
I wanted to discuss my life with him not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel... I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.