A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.

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.

If you had the power to destroy the world, would you do so?

Because on some level, even though it never turns out to be true, and even though I should know better, I still expect life to be like the movies.

It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.

I don't want to be viewed as a womaniser or whatever. I don't like going crazy crazy, I like having fun but it's nice to wake up in your own bed, isn't it?

Quaintness is creepy. So let's maximize that.

I can't say, 'It doesn't matter if you win or lose.' It's not true. You go in to win.

I lived five years in Portugal and then spent winters in Nepal or India.

Singing's not my real passion.

One of the chief misfortunes of honest people is that they are cowardly.

Actions rare and sudden do commonly proceed from fierce necessity, of else from some oblique design, which is ashamed to show itself in the public road.