When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading. He did not stir. They place….

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 p….

I'd rather have a book, but in a pinch I'll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions..

Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence..

One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer..

Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky ch….

E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate..

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 pla….

Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase..

I have never been able to resist a book about books..

If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs..

Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure.

Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself..

Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The c….

In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar..

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter..

When I write after dark", observed Cyril Connolly, "the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.

It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather..

When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer in….

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 sub….

The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet..