I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.

Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.

Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.

Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.

I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening.

Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.

If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.

Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

My soul is not asleep. It is awake, wide awake. It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches, its eyes wide open far-off things, and listens at the shores of the great silence.

If all it took was someone proclaiming I believe Jesus Christ and that he died for my sins, and that was all there was to it, people wouldn't have to keep coming to church, would they.

Lyndon Johnson believed the poor deserved a better life than the economy was providing them. He thought private power and greed had to be checked by a vibrant democracy.

If you show up in L.A. with your shirt inside out or socks mismatched, people start putting change in your cup.

You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute.

It's the golden age of French cinema again but it's because Sarkozy had the guts to push through copyright law.

You might be a redneck if your beer can collection is considered a tourist attraction in your home town.

In my life I think I made really solid decisions, and I would stand by them all over again.

I don't like surgery. I don't like elective surgery, I don't like surgery that you have to have.

When photography was invented, it was thought to be an equivalent to truth. It was truth with a capital T.