Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

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.

Every thing in this world exist to wear you down

But ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put.

Brave, impossible Alice. Stop being so sensible.

Music is my religion.

The chief merit of language is clearness.

If it's all wrong, it's all right.

Death hath so many doors to let out life.

Bach is the beginning and end of all music.

God is Spirit - without the Holy Spirit you cannot relate to Him.

I wouldn't mind doing a soundtrack someday.