In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.

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 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.

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.

Even friends need private spaces, if only within the depths of their own souls, where no one else is allowed to intrude.

A man is rich not only by what he has, but also, and above all, by what he doesn't.

and everyone wants to read the poem we’re afraid to write.

The answer of our prayers is secured by the fact that in rejecting them God would in a certain sense deny His own nature.

Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops.

It is no use asking me or anyone else how to dig... Better to go and watch a man digging, and then take a spade and try to do it.

It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.

'Obamacare,' as it's been called, is far too reaching. It's overreaching. It needs to have a lot of it repealed.

I've always improvised, and stand-up was this great release. All of a sudden, it was just me and the audience.

I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey.