If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.

How do you press a wildflower into the pages of an e-book?

Rereading a favorite novel first read 5, 10, or 20 years ago, is a measure of our travel, how far we've come; it's a way of visiting an earlier self.

I am fatally attracted to all bookstores.

Books were in the world; the world was in books.

Books connect us with others, but that connection is created in solitude, one reader in one chair hearing one writer, what John Irving refers to as one genius speaking to another.

Books, I knew then and now, give body to our ideas and imaginations, make them flesh in the world; a bookstore is the city where our fleshed-out inner selves reside.

Books are slow. They require time; they are written slowly, published slowly, and read slowly.

The bookstore and the coffeehouse are natural allies; Neither has a time limit, slowness is encouraged.

Maturity and experience shouldn't stop one from craving silly things like sliding down bannisters.

If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3, 900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.

Insight leads to Realisation. Realisation changes the lens, which changes the conversation. And this is the start.

The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom - these are the pillars of society.

Some writers hate to go to trials, but I love trials.

It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.

I hate playing the bass, bro. I've been playing the bass because it's there and I don't want anyone else to play it.

People need each other and think it is love. There's no hanging on to, or fencing in, of the other one when one loves.

God's delight is received upon surrender, not awarded upon conquest.

You can't teach a monkey to speak and you can't teach an Arab to be democratic.

Someone wrote a piece about Henry Green in The Partisan Review that was so intriguing that I got one of his novels, Loving, I believe, which was the first that came to attention in the United States.

It is difficult to prove yourself reliable when people are required to wait for you.