"We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become."
"Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books."
"As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul."
"To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road."
"My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it."
"I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now."