...habits are happiness of a sort... - Randall Jarrell

Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.

The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.

Lending a favorite book has its risks; the borrower may not like it. I still don’t know a better novel than Crime and Punishment — still, every fourth or fifth borrower returns it unfinished: it depresses him; besides that, he didn’t believe it. More borrowers than this return the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past unfinished: they were bored. There is no book you can lend people that all of them will like.