For me, books are music for my mind and my imagination. When I am stuck in something I'm writing, I simply read my way out of being stuck. You can never waste time reading.

I almost never slept deeply anymore--as soon as she said my name, I always sat up immediately, no matter how tired I was.

Watch out for life ... It's harder than it looks.

you could see the roads crisscrossing over the fields. When cars went by, far away, the beams were so bright they seemed to be ropes of light pulling the cars behind.

Here at the sea---especially at the sea---I could hear my sister’s voice in the waves: “Kira-kira! Kira-kira!

It took seven years from the day I decided I wanted to write fiction to actually getting a book published.

I love writing about people on the road.

The blue of the sky is one of the most special colors in the world, because the color is deep but see-through both at the same time.

Why would a book in which hardly anything happened for most of the time eat at me so much? It was the weirdest thing

It sounded so weird when people called shoyu "soy sauce." It made it sound like Tabasco or something instead of the clean and perfect thing that it was.

... history - the lamp which illumines national character...

The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire not things we fear.

Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.

And he was gone before she could think clearly enough to explain that her yes was a Yes, I'll marry you.

The dew, 'Tis of the tears which stars weep, sweet with joy.

We have put the Cold War behind us. We no longer count our divisions and our warheads. And I am Russia's first civilian defense minister in many centuries. We have become more pragmatic.

The cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate.

I'm not an original composer. The tunes are not stolen from other tunes necessarily except in a few cases, but they're in the style of songs that I grew up with.

When you do films that have multiple sequels, you develop a character for a film.

So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.