At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point, you have to gather yourself up, and go onward into your life.

...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.

One who loves his community destroys community; one who loves its members builds community.

That man is thought a dangerous knave, Or zealot plotting crime, Who for advancement of his kind Is wiser than his time.

The best way is always the simplest. The attics of the world are cluttered up with complicated failures.

Once I had a better beat, I needed to have an even better one. And somewhere in that climbing, I lost sight of, sort of, my moral and ethical underpinnings.

Too many Americans are dependent on federal government.

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

Much more than a 20th-century village storyteller, Cees Nooteboom stands as an impressive and inimitable voice among contemporary writers.

Does this feel warmer or colder?

My son Jack once said to me, 'Dad, do you think people are laughing with you or at you?' And I said, 'I don't care as long as they're laughing.'