There is no good word for stomach; just as there is no good word for girlfriend. Stomach is to girlfriend as belly is to lover, and as abdomen is to consort, and as middle is to petite amie.

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.

Honesty makes stories real and characters memorable. From there, taking them to where they need to go will be all the development they need.

Sometimes, we can’t help but to shed tears!

It's not a career for anyone who needs or values security. It's a career for gamblers. Every time you write a book you roll the dice again.

There are people who kind of let you know that you can silence the room.

The Great Spirit Chief who rules above all will smile upon this land... and this time the Indian race is waiting and praying.

It is often a mistake to combine two pleasures, because pleasures, like pains, can act as counter-irri-tants to each other.

Why do men go to zoos?

When I was fresh out of law school, I had a burning desire to do something important, to have an impact in some way, but I didn't know what it was.

A rocket is an experiment; a star is an observation.

I am tired of the litany of months, September October I am tired of the way the seasons keep changing, mimicking the seasons of the flesh which are real and finite.