The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading.

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

Adversity is a great teacher, but this teacher makes us pay dearly for its instruction; and often the profit we derive, is not worth the price we paid.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond the prose of cause and effect.

Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.

When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.

Since films and television have staged everything imaginable before it happens, a true event, taking place in the real world, brings to mind the landscape of films.

To the one who views from a larger perspective....everything is a blessing.

I have never been good at saying goodbyes to people. What else can they offer rather than a reciprocal desolation?

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?

We have our ambition for the future and God. And thus we put God as a plus sign after something else we want.

I got involved in Gateway National Park and just became fascinated with gardens.

Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.

If I go to a nightclub, even if the music is good, if the sound system is not, I don't stay.

I make music as good as possible, but I do reference cultural icons, because I want my music to be a time capsule of 2007.

Architecture begins to matter when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads.

Belgrade has kind of a Dublinesque, dear-dirty charm.