"

I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us t...more

"

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not...more

"

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and ma...more

"

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great wo...more

"

Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story m...more

"

A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that w...more

"

Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: C...more

"

Jefferson, who spent his life collecting books, many of which he donated to the Library of Congress, boasted that America was the only country whose f...more

"

But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indiffer...more

"

Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where peopl...more

"

When the founding fathers conceived of this new nation, they understood that the education of its citizens would be essential to the health of their d...more

"

correlation between the growing lack of respect for ideas and the imagination and the increasing gap between rich and poor in America, reflected not j...more

"

It is not just bookstores and libraries that are disappearing but museums, theaters, performing arts centers, art and music schools— all those places ...more