For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.

If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.

In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.

I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.

Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.

It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.

The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.

Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.

Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.

Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.

I have never been able to resist a book about books.

Follow your heart, not the law.

Beauty is power a smile is its sword.

I don't like being consumed by work all the time. I consume myself so much when I do a part that I like to step away from it.

Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.

My father has always been the heart of my Penn Cage novels.

I've learned a lot about genuinely not caring what strangers think about me. It's very liberating.

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.

First they ignore you, then they denounce you, and then they say that they knew what you were saying all the time.

And I went off to Stanford, I was pretty young and pretty naive. And I had a professor I really loved, who was himself a lawyer.

Streetcar is the most wonderful, wonderful play.