Your reader is at least as bright as you are

- William Maxwell

Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).

- William Maxwell

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby r…

- William Maxwell

Love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera.

- William Maxwell

The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy you…

- William Maxwell

If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.

- William Maxwell

My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and …

- William Maxwell

Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.

- William Maxwell

The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.

- William Maxwell