We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.
For me writing is foremost a mode of thinking and when it works well, an act of discovery.
I am not merely a habitual quoter but an incorrigible one. I am, I may as well face it, more quotatious than an old stock-market ticker-tape machine, except that you can’t unplug me.
We who are quotatious are never truly alone, but always hear the cheerful flow of remarks made by dead writers so much more intelligent than we.
I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks.
My wife who is non-Jewish regrets it all the time that I can say these terrible things about fellow Jews and she can’t.
What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, and what we do to make them come about.
If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses?
I know how deeply slothful I am.
I know how many days in which I have just answered e-mail, had three phone calls and a two hour lunch. Poof, gone. They are not infrequent.
Within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.
A writer can get into a vast deal of trouble through misquotation. If you ever want to receive lots of mail, I recommend you get a Shakespeare quote wrong in a magazine or newspaper.
Someone – Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? – once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.
It is difficult to be ambitious without also being envious.
The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one’s thoughts even any crowded concert or art museum.
For reasons no one has yet explained, the Internet is at once riveting and a great killer of concentration.
The best way to ensure that your writing is as good as you can make it is simply to consult your imagination and judgment as you write and take note of whether you are using an expression that has found its way into the stream simply because it’s always there, swirling lifelessly in an eddy, where it was recently deposited by some other writer you have read.
The study of the past is the main portal through which culture is acquired.
And it is a good thing that many ideas have a relatively short shelf-life. Some because they are bad, even pernicious ideas: the Master Race, the class struggle, the Oedipus complex, and Socialism are four bad ideas with wretched consequences that come immediately to mind.
Those who consider themselves good teachers probably aren’t.
Yet, for the person of literary education, all ideas, as Orwell felt ought to be the case with all saints, are guilty until proven innocent.