Books, I knew then and now, give body to our ideas and imaginations, make them flesh in the world; a bookstore is the city where our fleshed-out inner selves reside.

If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.

How do you press a wildflower into the pages of an e-book?

Rereading a favorite novel first read 5, 10, or 20 years ago, is a measure of our travel, how far we've come; it's a way of visiting an earlier self.

I am fatally attracted to all bookstores.

Books were in the world; the world was in books.

Books connect us with others, but that connection is created in solitude, one reader in one chair hearing one writer, what John Irving refers to as one genius speaking to another.

Books are slow. They require time; they are written slowly, published slowly, and read slowly.

The bookstore and the coffeehouse are natural allies; Neither has a time limit, slowness is encouraged.

Maturity and experience shouldn't stop one from craving silly things like sliding down bannisters.

If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3, 900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.

What you believe of yourself is what you will become.

Each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being a potential prophet a new spiritual prince a new spark of light precipitated into the outer darkness.

I am not absent-minded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

'Social engineering, ' the fancy term for tricking you into giving away your digital secrets, is at least as great a threat as spooky technology.

Yeah, I'd like to get the girl and at least make it through the film.

Ah, one favor: if he telephones again, tell him it's no use, that I've gone out.

Noble spirits are heterodox.

I joined the swim team when I was 12, and I was the worst kid in the pool - I was put with a group of 7-year-olds.

You've got to really know your song, inside and out.

Beauty may be perceived in any scene by one with sympathy and understanding. Beauty is in the mind.