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.

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.

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