“Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.”

“I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, ”

“I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even when they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.”

“Dad followed his I’m-So-Disappointed speech with a lecture on career opportunities. “You’re going to study literature and get a job doing what?” he said. “Literaturizing?”

“The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.”

“A reader of mine is a deluxe reader, not because I’m so great but because in order to get to me you have to take a path through literature, not through some books bought out of curiosity at the bookstore. A reader of mine has to have read other things.”