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If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one...more

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Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If ...more

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Children should have enough freedom to be themselves - once they've learned the rules.

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I prize my downtime, count on it as a writer, a parent, a person. Sometimes I think of Woody Allen's remark about masturbation, that it is sex with so...more

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I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

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Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

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In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I mi...more

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We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

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How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transce...more

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the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

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Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot liv...more

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Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, wh...more

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Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

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In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I mi...more

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While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, w...more