Rather than feeling that every moment you’ve got to exert this enormous control, you can take the attitude that your job as a writer is not to control everything, but to set things in motion.

The public library is where place and possibility meet.

Loaded with note cards for research papers that I was hopelessly behind on, I'd enter the Public Library only to end up wandering around lost, wasting the day.

Loyalty in a critic is corruption.

Live together like brothers and do business like strangers.

We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.

There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

Jazz has been the voice of freedom for so many countries over the past half century.

I think there has to be the sense that once you have climbed the ladder of success, that you don't push it away from the building.

An adult who does not understand that a child needs to use his hands and does not recognize this as the first manifestation of an instinct for work can be an obstacle to the child's development

Whether or not regime change is a good idea or a bad idea. I don't think because I think the regime change was a bad idea it means that Hussein was necessarily a good idea.

I would be lost without baseball. I don't think I could stand being away from it as long as I was alive.