Dexter was mad about the past. He believed in it, it sustained him, he used it to knit meaning into the mess of everything.

Let’s agree to abandon forever the idea that the depiction of family life is the province of women artists, and therefore insubstantial. Let’s refuse to hear a sneer in the term domestic.

My book-buying eclipses my book-reading. There are huge piles of things I’ve been meaning to read waiting patiently for me.

What a book is about is, to some degree, beside the point. A plot is quite apart from the experience of reading a book.