Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.

His argument runs like this: there is no goodness without free will. Without the ability to freely choose-or reject-the good, an individual possesses no control over his own soul, and without that control, there is not possibility of attaining grace. In the language of Christianity, a beliver cannot be saved unless the choice to follow Christ is freely made, unless the option not to follow him genuinely exists. Compelled belief is no belief at all.

Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.

We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention.

The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.

Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It’s all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.

Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn't. In that faraway place, no character is created equal. One or two of them get all the breaks; the rest exist to get them to the finish line.

Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.

If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it.

History is story, too. You don't encounter her directly; you've only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another.

Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.' I've always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence.

Every novel is brand-new. It’s never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it’s merely the latest in a long line of narratives—not just novels, but narratives generally—since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other.

we accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.

Please note, I am not suggesting that illicit drugs are required to break down social barriers.

Now, Joyce being Joyce, he has about five different purposes, one not being enough for genius.

Reading...is a full-contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources.

The difference between being Achilles and almost being Achilles is the difference between living and dying.

The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again