Generations of readers, bored with their own alienating, repetitious jobs, have been mesmerized by Crusoe's essential, civilization-building chores.

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.

Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.

The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're "decoding

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.

The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.

It's a gift of tranquility when your adult desires mesh with your childhood background. I don't quite know why mine didn't, although I think books, again, are partly to blame.

Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in.

Those straight-spined parishioners could justify their exhibitionism by telling themselves that they were setting an example, even educating the rest of us.

Reading, my earliest refuge in the unknown world, made me want to venture into it.

One of the many drawbacks of this "I teach what I am" approach is that it stifles classroom discussion. Any disagreement with the professor's expertise comes off as an ad hominem attack.

That fire you see can't last. Still, as it burns, it lights everything.

I give myself sometimes admirable advice but I am incapable of taking it.

I'd so much rather people think I was funny than pretty.

You don't have to buy from anyone. You don't have to work at any particular job. You don't have to participate in any given relationship. You can choose.

If you're telling a story it's always best not to play the ending.

I went to China for a brief working visit, and I thought that Shanghai was interesting, but Beijing totally grabbed me.

Who knows, maybe I am simply a talented architect?

We all have an infant inside of us, but the infant doesn't have to run the show.

Jewellery takes people's minds off your wrinkles.

My time in the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply disillusioning experience.