Temple of Texts Book

[More on that List:
"There are many famous works, and a few famous writers, who are not among my fifty. It is not just some reasonable limit that has kept them off. My list is supposed to represent works which, I feel, have changed me as a writer in some important way, and while making such a list may be an act of egotism, it does not possess the arrogance of a roll call of Great Books. That is not to suggest that I do not believe in great books, for I believe in very little else'some music, some paintings, a few buildings, perhaps. Great books are great for innumerable reasons, but one of them surely is that they will remain faithful to the values they are made of."

On Mallarmé:
"A piece of paper, where it became a page, became pure space, a space over which a divinity brooded as though it were the primeval waste. And words were not to be words. When were words in poems ever words? And a book, a book was not to be a book. Open one. Perhaps that opening exposes a great snowfield where a word, now a single dead bird, lay in the snow and sang nothing … sang it. I always thought it very exciting to know that there were men who looked on language and its page like that, who lived in a withinness wider than any without, who quietly blew up the Customary (Nietzsche said his books were bombs), so quietly, customers purchased the ruins to furnish their flats."


In Defense of Books:
"In the ideal logotopia, every person would possess their own library, and add at least weekly, if not daily, to it. The walls of each home would seem made of books'wherever one looked, one would see only spines; because every real book (as opposed to dictionaries, almanacs, and other compilations) is a mind, an imagination, a consciousness. Together, they comprise a civilization, or even several.

"Culture is a matter of considered and consistent choice, and high culture is concerned with estimations of quality."

"(Ben)Jonson also makes marvelous lists, and I love lists. His are not as supreme, perhaps, as Rabelais's, but they are quite calorific. The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words."

"Between Shakespeare and Joyce, there is no one but Dickens who has an equal command of the English language."

"It was Flann who knew most particularly the emptiness of an Irishman's saloon life, the chaff and chat and ruminations that went wetly nowhere, the liquor necessary to set one's sexuality on indefinite simmer, dull the sense of failure, fill boredom with bad jokes. Though Flann is simply poking fun, nevertheless the needled balloon bursts and out rushes its bad air."

"Nor is any virtue, in Kant's terms, unqualifiedly virtuous, for if we were to give our allegiance exclusively to one of them (by dreaming of a society without hunger, for instance), we should have to sacrifice too much else.(...)As Milton inadvertently demonstrated, goodness is confining and limits God's sphere of action, turning him into a droning bore. Eve ate to break the monotony.(...)To know the meaning of evil, you must understand the meaning of good, as Satan certainly does, since he is a fallen angel." (hide spoiler)]