“One generation's pleasure became a burden for another. Hence, entire collections from father to son were sold for a song, and the vendors, knowing nothing about literature, would place a price on the books. (about secondhand literature book)”

“Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.”

“Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.”

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

“In general, [. . .] novel-theorists have nothing very urgent or interesting to say about literature. Why then do they write when they have nothing to say? Because the ambitious teacher can only rise in the academic bureaucracy by writing at complicated length about writing that has already been much written about. The result of all this book-chat cannot interest anyone who knows literature while those who would like to learn something about books can only be mystified and discouraged by these commentaries.”

“...literature must always be about gloom of one sort or another, on the principal that there is nothing interesting to be said about happy people.”