Widespread public access to knowledge, like public education, is one of the pillars of our democracy, a guarantee that we can maintain a well-informed citizenry.

The prosecutor, who is supposed to carry the burden of proof, really is an author.

I cannot think of a day in my life when the library didn’t exert a potent attraction for me, offering a sense of the specialness of each individual’s curiosity and his or her quest to satisfy it.

Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.

What kills a person at twenty-five? Leukemia. An accident. But George knows the better odds are that someone who passes at that age dies of unhappiness. Drug overdose. Suicide. Reckless behavior.

I count myself as one of millions of Americans whose life simply would not be the same without the libraries that supported my learning.

Life is simply experience; for reasons not readily discerned, we attempt to go on.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

'Torts' more or less means 'wrongs'...One of my friends said that Torts is the course which proves that your mother was right.

Who are we but the stories we tell about ourselves, particularly if we accept them?

Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.

The worst thing you can do is make money at the expense of losing your time.

I was born to other things.

I hate dates. It becomes a weird auditioning process. And I've never had normal dating.

Nothing can take the sting out of the world’s economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with golden statues.

It is a comfort, in anguish, to be reminded of the scale of one's own troubles against the mighty breadth of the world.

The gospel will die in the toxic soil of self.

I'm still a farm boy at heart. If I hadn't suffered from asthma as a child, I would be a farmer today.

A dining room table with children's eager hungry faces around it, ceases to be a mere dining room table, and becomes an altar.

Whatever plan one makes, there is a hidden difficulty somewhere.