My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning ….

If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone.

I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all ove….

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

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

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

It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious completely unrelated to the rest of….

My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the ….

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, intern….

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me..

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

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

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….

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..

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

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

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….

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….

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

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….