All thinking is done with the glands. Logic is added later to tidy things up.

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.

Night and gin and music-the right setting for peeling off the thin clinging layers of bullshit and finding one's way down closer to the essential self.

You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.

If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.

A nonreader is somebody standing there in a blindfold.

The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.

A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.

Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.

Sheer effort enables those with nothing to surpass those with privilege and position.

The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser in musty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher.

Anything done for another is done for oneself.

Big results require big ambitions.

Cease to inquire what the future has in store, and to take as a gift whatever the day brings forth. [Lat., Quid sit futurum cras, fuge quaerere: et Quem Fors dierum cunque dabit, lucro Appone.]

Reason deceives us; conscience, never.

I am really the victim of other people's imagination.

We all have choices and must make them for ourselves.

Never revisit the past, that's dangerous. You know, move on.

Mary Decker Slaney, the world greatest front runner, I shouldn't be surprised to see her at the front