E.B. White's essays are the best things I've read about Maine - especially the one in which he's not sure if he can go out sailing any more in his sloop.

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.

I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.

Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.

But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.

Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

Common sense is one of the most unused commodities available to man.

One declaims endlessly against the passions

To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone.

If you're not a target, you're a failure.

if we cultivate compassion for those who have hurt us, we have the possibility of overcoming our anger,pain, and fear. compassion is a great medicine.

I put less stock in others' opinions than my own. No one else's opinions could derail me.

So much can be gained from watching other singers, seeing what they do and what they don't do, seeing how they look when they breathe, how wide they open their mouths for a high note.

There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.

Legitimate profit is good. What's bad is profiteering.

Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.