I was raised as a Catholic and received the body and blood of Jesus Christ every Sunday at communion until I was thirty years of age, when I became a vegetarian.

If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find 'reality' a bit of a disappointment.

Great writers say things that are so beautiful, the very act of repeating them makes life itself more beautiful.

Purists maintain that if you go to a baseball game you will almost always see something you have never seen before. Unfortunately, it usually takes place in the stands.

Book lovers are engaged with writers in a private communion that occurs in some vaporous cenacle of the mind.

Every life, even the best ones, ends in sadness. Books hold out hope that things may end otherwise.

People who prefer e-books...think that books merely take up space. This is true, but so do your children and Prague and the Sistine Chapel.

Lending books to other people is merely a shrewd form of housecleaning.

It is never a good sign when the most exciting thing on television is a dancing Republican.

Because to the poor, books are not diversions. Book are siege weapons.

I have never squandered an opportunity to read.

The things that make me different are the things that make me.

Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts.

I'm very partisan, but I'm also very fair.

I play an 89-year-old man whose wife has Alzheimer's in a movie called 'Still.' I play a World War II veteran, I acted with my son and it's called 'Memorial Day.'

Especially in football, it is not a QB's game... even though the media likes to make it into that - it takes the whole team.

Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.

I pray this winter be gentle and kind - a season of rest from the wheel of the mind.

I'm such a control freak, and it's very hard for me to lose my inhibitions without something chemical inside me.

Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.

The enemy of creativity is fear.