Books connect us with others, but that connection is created in solitude, one reader in one chair hearing one writer, what John Irving refers to as one genius speaking to another.

If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.

How do you press a wildflower into the pages of an e-book?

Rereading a favorite novel first read 5, 10, or 20 years ago, is a measure of our travel, how far we've come; it's a way of visiting an earlier self.

I am fatally attracted to all bookstores.

Books were in the world; the world was in books.

Books, I knew then and now, give body to our ideas and imaginations, make them flesh in the world; a bookstore is the city where our fleshed-out inner selves reside.

Books are slow. They require time; they are written slowly, published slowly, and read slowly.

The bookstore and the coffeehouse are natural allies; Neither has a time limit, slowness is encouraged.

Maturity and experience shouldn't stop one from craving silly things like sliding down bannisters.

If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3, 900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.

Keep your ears open and listen to the whispers of the universe, because they will guide you for the best.

Respect is the art of reciprocal. You can never earn respect by belittling and stepping over the people around you.

Leaders should always be the initiators of reconciliation.

We take unholy risks to prove we are what we cannot be. For instance, I am not even crazy.

We are born seekers, calling strange names into the darkness from our earliest days because we know we are not meant to be alone, and because we know that we await someone whom we cannot always see.

The family unit is the most important organization in time or in eternity.

I've worked every day since I was 10. I don't know how to do anything else. There is nothing else I'd rather be doing.

Government works less efficiently when it begins to grow out of control and takes on more and more of the responsibilities that belong to the citizens.

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

For healthy adult people, the really big thing we can foresee are ways of intervening in the ageing process, either by slowing or reversing it.