Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.

Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.

Life happened because I turned the pages.

All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.

I wanted to live among books.

I might be half Derek's size, but I was the one who sounded like a two-hundred-pound beast plowing through the woods.

And it occurs to me that if I were aboard a rowboat floating in the middle of all the beer I've drunk in a lifetime, I'd never be able to see the shore.

When I told my parents, 'I'm going to be an actor,' they screamed and wept and freaked out.

We are the custodians of life's meaning.

Sometimes it pays to be a little wild.

It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist.

Christianity is a very historical religion - it makes specific claims that are open to testing.

We can dream of an America, and a world, in which love and not money are civilization's bottom line.

I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy.

Unless you're involved with thinking about what you're doing, you end up doing the same thing over and over, and that becomes tedious and, in the end, defeating.