“Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.”

“The earth is God's book but in our blindness, we have obliterated letters so we may say God has abandoned us. It is we who are illiterate.”

“A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.”

“I had gone to graduate school because I loved literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism. Some professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a Marxist parable. Some other professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a Christian parable. Some other professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a parable of the Industrial Revolution. . . . Nobody seemed to give a shit about your reading TOM JONES as long as you could reel off the names of the various theories and who invented them. . . . My response was to sleep through as much of it as possible. ”

“I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.”

“Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it...”

“But I am wise if not yet quite old, wanting the poem more than the lover, wanting words more than the sticky dew men secrete in their private places.”