Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.

You never came out the way you came in.

God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.

I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.

What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.

When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.

Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.

do not compare yourself to others. if you do so you are insulting yourself.

I know you're there. I can detect your presence each time it closes in on mine.

Do not exchange your dignity for popularity.

A guitar is like an old friend that is there with me.

You'd think that sweet would be a land far, far away from irritating, but as it turns out they're right next door, and always having border disputes.

Love endeth like the chianti flask, its drops are bitter.

Of course people don't want war. Why should a poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best thing he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?

Let's just be smart this time. I'm looking for smart.

Truth is God, and truth overrides all our plans.

There are those who travel and those who are going somewhere. They are different and yet they are the same. The successful one has this over his rivals: he knows where he is going.