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

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.

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.

History isn't a seesaw. If you have a really bad regime on one side, the actions on the other side don't automatically become good. It doesn't work that way.

Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with.

It is difficult to get organic food at most restaurants, so when possible, eat at home. When not, do your best.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems

There sometimes wants only a stroke of fortune to discover numberless latent good or bad qualities, which would otherwise have been eternally concealed.

The music of Bach is without doubt the most sacred gift to the world of art.

...Drifting downstream in a row boat doesn't count against your life span.

Things could be worse and things could be so much better.

Every generation welcomes the pirates from the last.

A life lived for art, is never a life wasted.

In the past, I'd sort of know before Ozzy sang something, what he was going to sing. I'd know what sort of way a melody was going to go 'cause of the way he'd approach it.