To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.

No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.

Reading books is good, Rereading good books is better.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.

Books are islands in the ocean of time. They are also oases in the deserts of time.

I have always been reconciled to the fact that I was born a bibliomaniac, never have I sought a cure, and my dearest friends have been drawn from those likewise suffering from book madness.

This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.

No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library ... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have come to an end.

Wanting to believe something is powerful

Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative a momentary cessation of unhappiness.

He fell as gently as a tree falls. There was not even any sound.

The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.

You know, what 'New Girl' is doing is they're bringing in really cool people. These are home-run people who aren't your typical guest-star-type people.

you can love a person and still hate the decisions they've made, can't you?

I will not promise what I cannot deliver. And I will never hide the cost of what I propose.

There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.

We must be born with an intuition of mortality.

How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world.