And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm...
Actually, I can see one advantage to the Western way of thinking, which is that if someone has a name, you know what to call them, don’t you? It’s only one small advantage, and there are millions of b...
You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you.
Partially satisfied by grazing on the first few pages of several books, and as a consequence, there are half-chewed novels lying all over the place. At least, I’m presuming they’re lying all over the...
Don’t think people with talent necessarily value it, because it all comes so easy to them, and we never value things that come easy to us.
Women who disapprove of men—and there’s plenty to disapprove of—should remember how we started out, and how far we have had to travel. 3.
Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thou...
What a terrible thing an education was, he thought, if it produced the kind of mind that despised entertainment and the people who valued it.
We get together with people because they're the same or because they're different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons.
Walbourne's fluid, tasteful, beautiful solos drop the jaw, stop the heart, and smack the gob, all at the same time.
This, for the benefit of those with only a sketchy grasp of football tactics, was aDutch invention which necessitated flexibility from all the players on the pitch. Defenders were required to attack,...
There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. So
The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.
The trouble with influential books is that if you have absorbed the influence without ever reading the original, then it can sometimes be hard to appreciate the magnitude of its achievement.
The cliche had it that kids were the future, but that wasn't it: they were the unreflective, active present. They were not themselves nostalgic, because they couldn't be, and they retarded nostalgia i...
That’s what family stories were—amusing accounts of the messes and the fuckups. Take away the love and the laughter, narrate the stories as if the characters had acted with malice and self-absorption,...
So there we have it. I get up in the morning determined to do something approximating to the right thing, and with in two hours find something to feel guilty about.
So it's not about what you do. It can't be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and that's where I get eaten up.
See, I've always been afraid of marriage because of, you know, ball and chain, I want my freedom, all that. But when I was thinking about that stupid girl I suddenly saw it was the opposite: that if y...
Quasi tutta la gente ha una corda che la lega a qualcuno, e la corda può essere corta, oppure lunga. È che tu non lo sai quanto è lunga. Non è tua la scelta.