Poetry springs directly from our primal need and capacity for communication[Poetry] mobilizes such a concentration of devices, such an intensificatio….

Where am I when I am involved in a book?.

Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for….

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny..

The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself..

Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. ‘There’ was then; ‘here’ is now..

To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one's essential position [in….

I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up ….

A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space..

If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents..

Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril..

I read books to read myself..

A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world..

If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture..