“To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.”

Source: The Story Of The Bible, Chapter X, The Position Today, p. 142

"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Source: How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

Endpaper Pages, p. 314.
A History of Reading (1996)

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 2, p. 64-65

"Koheleth - the Man and his World" (1955), preface, p. vii

Preface to The Story of the Stone, Vol. 2: 'The Crab-Flower Club' (1979), p. 20

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews