Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

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.

History isn't a seesaw. If you have a really bad regime on one side, the actions on the other side don't automatically become good. It doesn't work that way.

Self-leadership is the most effective way to train leaders. How do you do that? Empower them to make decisions, you as a leader back them up and allow them to follow through

On the way toward success, obstacles are the barrier to build the power of the mind.

The message of the bicycle: Simplicity is a blessing!

The pure and poorly adapted one who crashed against the world of fakes and cheats.

Watching the debate this afternoon it was apparent they loved term limits in the House - as Brutus loved Caesar.

It's hard to believe that in the greatest democracy in the world, we need legislation to prevent the government from writing and paying for the news.

Woe to the man who tries to stretch the imagination of man He shall be mocked he shall be scourged by the blinkered guardians of morality.

There is no use getting angry at something that has already happened.All you can do is your best to check it doesn't happen again.

Empathy takes time, and efficiency is for things, not people.

Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.