First, if you love the Kindle and it works for you, it isn't problematic, and you should ignore all my criticisms and read the way you want to read.

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.

Art is anything you can get away with.

There is always something good and unique in the life of every woman so put those talents and wisdom to good use today, by so doing you will make your world a better place than you met it.

I find skydiving really hard. I broke my back while skydiving when I was in the military, and for 18 months all my nightmares were about falling.

I may look fake but I'm real where it counts.

The older the grapes, sweeter the wine.

Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; thats what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.

Ask yourself, "When does this decision have to be taken?" and having answered it, defer the decision until then, in order to give yourself maximum pondering time.

I tend to sit around with my friends a lot and rant and rave about things I think are ridiculous in the world, and I tend to make fun of myself a lot.

A lot times you have your frame very much in mind and you're waiting for things to fall in place.

There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.