A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.

Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.

If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents.

A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space.

If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

I read books to read myself.

The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.

Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. ‘There’ was then; ‘here’ is now.

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

when you are a child you unconsciously adopt certain beliefs. Yet, there comesthe necessity to upgrade these beliefs as you grow older.

A brother's sympathy is more precious than an angel's embassy.

You can't trust anybody with power.

We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.

Science that leads over the horizon depends on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the time.

Even now I don't consider myself skinny, but I have put a lot of hard work into my body over the years, and in the process, I've really learned to love myself.

We cannot change the Koran or make no modifications, this cannot be done, or it would no longer be holy.

I'm into eating as little as possible... I never cook. Never use the stove or anything.

Jesus is not a figure from the past: He continues now and always to light the way for us.

The most ethical administration in the history of the Republic.