Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.

I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

I got so strongly addicted to love that I may not be able to breath without it. I fall so fondly in love with poetry that I read it in my dreams often and even unknowingly.

Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life!

Witticism. A sharp and clever remark, usually quoted and seldom noted; what the Philistine is pleased to call a joke.

To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.

It is rare to find learned men who are clean, do not stink and have a sense of humour.

Meditation is a refocusing on symbols. It's not emptiness. We are using symbols, doorways to step from one world to another, from darkness into light, from death to immortality.

He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times.

I do a lot of writing in my capacity as the creative director for a marketing agency. These days, though, I'm trying to write a little bit most evenings just to keep the creative juices flowing.

We want everyone to prepare themselves for the reality that we are not going to be able to recover significant numbers of people.

A moment of silence is not inherently religious.