The secret of the store's success has been that the owners loved books and weren't afraid to have opinions or share them with their customers.  And the customers responded to that passion.

I started reading Harvey Pekar’s comic book series American Splendor in high school, when I was anxious about my future and frustrated by my present. Little did I know then, Pekar would soon become a friend and a confidant of sorts.

My magnificent agent died a few days ago. Her name was Emilie Jacobson, but her colleagues called her Emmy. She found me in a slush pile.

It occurs to me that I’m judging Holden more like an old friend than a character in a novel. This is perhaps the largest compliment I can pay him, and Salinger, too.

Though it has been talked about as the greatest vanishing act in the history of American letters, Salinger's turns out to be one of the triumphant careers.

Levi-Strauss' most important ideas would become so ubiquitous that you probably already know them, even if you don't know you know.

in the subculture of which Jim Carroll was a sort of poet laureate - one of them, anyway - the movie of The Basketball Diaries registers only as a minor souvenir.