The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.

I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.

Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.

The memories of walks...are hitched on to particular times and places

The fate of the world depends on the triumph of the good people!

There are lots of ways to communicate what we know, but few ways to communicate what we feel. Music is one way to communicate emotions.

Love without action is meaningless and action without love is irrelevant.

There are worse things than getting a call for a wrong number at 4 am. It could be a right number.

Obama a ‘light-skinned’ African-American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.

It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.

[Oliver Wendell] Holmes never believed in the truth and morality of the laws he was upholding. He said, "I loathe the thick-fingered clowns we call the people."

There is one thing in life that you can always rely on: life being as it is.

I'm singing background on one of Blondie's songs on her new album