Where am I when I am involved in a book?

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

Sometimes I think that the long-term work of reading is to discover one by one, the books that hold the scattered elements of our nature, after which the true consummation can begin. We undertake the gradual focused exploration, nuance by nuance, of their meanings, their implications; we follow out the strands that mysteriously connect the words of another with the unformulated stuff of the self.

It is in adolescence that most of us grasp that life – our own life – is a problem to be solved, that a set of personal unknowns must now be factored together with the frightening variables of experience. The future suddenly appears – it is the space upon which the answers will be inscribed.

Just to see my books, to note their presence, their proximity to other books, fills me with a sense of futurity.

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.

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

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

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