Change is legitimate and inevitable, for our language is a mighty river, picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there, but growing ever wider and richer.

You learn, just as you learn good manners, how to approach things with a certain amount of diplomacy.

Words make another place, a place to escape to with your spirit alone.

Parents can plant magic in a child's mind through certain words spoken with some thrilling quality of voice, some uplift of the heart and spirit.

The greatest luxury is being able to go to movies and plays now and then in the afternoons.

After I became a citizen, I felt freer to say what I thought about this country, both negative and positive. I think I had been, consciously and subconsciously, biting my tongue in the past.

I am not really retired, and may never be completely, but I can't think of a better place to contemplate retirement than New York City.

Yes, after some time spent last year on other commitments, most of them speaking engagements, I am now about halfway through a novel that I hope will come out in 1998.

Wordstruck is exactly what I was—and still am: crazy about the sound of words, the look of words, the taste of words, the feeling for words on the tongue and in the mind.

Television has created a nation of news junkies who tune in every night to get their fix on the world.

I'm happy to have my own opinion and air it when I think it's necessary.

Sometimes you can lock the doors and close the blinds, but the monsters are still there inside your house, sleeping and breathing and just waiting to wake up and terrorize you all over again.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

I'm a misplaced American, but don't know where I was misplaced.

Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it.

I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.

The happiest and most glorious hours of my life with books have been with German books.

If we had some eggs we could have eggs and ham, if we had some ham.

Your early successes can be your undoing later.

To venture causes anxiety. Not to venture is to lose oneself.

He bats like a lightning rod.