“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”