“The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're "decoding”

“I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.”

“The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.”

“My own mother, who's always dazzled by my faculty and answering questions in the literature a category on Jeopardy whenever we watch it together, keeps urging me to try to get on the show to make a...”

“It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.”

“Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in.”

“If a man does not work passionately - even furiously - at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God.”

“I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prov...”

“Not everything you're good at is what you're called to do.”