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I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented ...more

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Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

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You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.

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Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

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Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where histor...more

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It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. ...more

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It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on...more

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It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on...more

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She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.

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Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must...more

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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in exper...more

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So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form ha...more

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Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got t...more