“Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure”

“When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading. He did not stir. They placed a straw hat on his head. No response. Only when they took away the wooden chair on which he was sitting did he, as he puts it, 'wake out of the book'.”

“If the soul cannot find its jacket. it is condemned to an eternity of wandering--naked and alone”

“Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.”

“In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.”

“One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.”

“Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.”