The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.

I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.

Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.

But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.

Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light.

I don’t want to write a book which will bring me fame for just an hour. I will try to write something which may not be very popular but it may last forever.

So then I bid him farewell and walked down the side of the pool leading to the outside entrance where I waited for soph to come down so we could walk home together

Romanticism is the expression of man's urge to rise above reason and common sense just as rationalism is the expression of his urge to rise above theology and emotion.

I'm probably working on three different scripts at any time, so there's never a time where I've got nothing to do.

Fun can be the dessert of our lives but never its main course.

I want people to smile when they hear my name. I love everyone. I want to help make it a better time for the kids after me.

The capitalist priority is efficiency of capital and profitability, which is generally inconsistent with protecting the vulnerabilities of people and nature.

Not surprisingly, the chief way self-published authors get the word out about their books is through the Internet.

And if you don't have your ears open, you're not going to be able to figure out what you should be doing.