Unbending virtue dies on the page. Bores, prigs, hypocrites, blowhards, martinets — these are the glories of world literature.
Jul 152013
Reading
The dead alive and busy.
—Vaughan
Jul 052013
You stir up a lot of sunken knowledge when you reorganize your library.
Jun 262013
The great American creeps are Poe and Whitman, and the great American bores are Emerson and Hemingway.
Jun 182013
No novel can contain a character more intelligent than its author.
Jun 112013
No book has ever been too short.
Jun 042013
The worst hangover is the morning after you finish a bad book.
May 292013
There is little difference between collecting books and collecting porcelain elephants.
May 212013
We all know intimately many more fictional characters than real ones.
Apr 032013
In fiction murderers and thieves often elicit the reader’s sympathy and understanding; snobs and ingrates elicit only his contempt.
Apr 012013
We laugh at novels in which the weather tracks the moods of the characters, yet our own moods mostly track the weather.