Reading, my earliest refuge in the unknown world, made me want to venture into it.

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.

Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.

The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're "decoding

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.

The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.

It's a gift of tranquility when your adult desires mesh with your childhood background. I don't quite know why mine didn't, although I think books, again, are partly to blame.

Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in.

Those straight-spined parishioners could justify their exhibitionism by telling themselves that they were setting an example, even educating the rest of us.

One of the many drawbacks of this "I teach what I am" approach is that it stifles classroom discussion. Any disagreement with the professor's expertise comes off as an ad hominem attack.

Generations of readers, bored with their own alienating, repetitious jobs, have been mesmerized by Crusoe's essential, civilization-building chores.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.", NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)

Somewhere, all the people we have loved and lost are still among us, in the house that we call history.

We think that tomorrow, unless we surrender, they may drop the moon on us." "You're joking.""Wish I was.

I was born by God's dear grace, in an extraordinary place. Where the stars and stripes, and the eagle fly.

Let's kick the tires and light the fires, big daddy.

My papa said son don't let the man getcha and do what he done to me.

You can't enjoy your life if you don't enjoy YOURSELF.

I wouldn't say I've changed my mind. I changed some of my natural habits, some of my natural character.

No one ever writes me and says, 'We have a happy hospital'. Nowhere is doing it in a healthy way. That's encouragement for me.

Meanwhile after failing the bar twice, I knew some people in New York and moved here in August '71.