You stir up a lot of sunken knowledge when you reorganize your library.
Reading
The dead alive and busy.
—Vaughan
The great American creeps are Poe and Whitman, and the great American bores are Emerson and Hemingway.
No novel can contain a character more intelligent than its author.
No book has ever been too short.
The worst hangover is the morning after you finish a bad book.
There is little difference between collecting books and collecting porcelain elephants.
We all know intimately many more fictional characters than real ones.
In fiction murderers and thieves often elicit the reader’s sympathy and understanding; snobs and ingrates elicit only his contempt.
We laugh at novels in which the weather tracks the moods of the characters, yet our own moods mostly track the weather.
Code is poetry, which says nothing about code, but poetry is also code, which says a lot about poetry.