While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.

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.

Now she smiles as if I'm her favorite chocolate bar. "And I love you, Jordan.

My sister discovered the Beatles when she was about 11 and I'm four years younger. So we had nothing but Beatles paraphernalia. Every night I fell asleep to a different Beatles album.

I think it must be apparent to every thinking mind that the noblest of all professions is that of teaching, and that upon the effectiveness of that teaching hangs the destiny of nations.

If you want to be successful, you must either have a chance or take one.

Only one who has achieved immortality of awareness can laugh with life and laugh with death.

The key to all sciences is unquestionably the question mark. To the word How? we owe most of our greatest discoveries. Wisdom in life may perhaps consist in asking ourselves on all occasions: Why?

We don't want any vocalist messing up the music.

I was struck by - Einstein's a fascinating figure who didn't have any instruments that he used, he didn't use telescopes, he used his mind to try to understand the universe.

To be suspicious is not a fault. To be suspicious all the time without coming to a conclusion is the defect.

We conservatives don't have a corner on saying no. We're just the ones who say it when it's the right thing to say.