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.

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.

There are three trips you take to India: the one you think you’re going to have – that you plan for

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.

We've created a tenfold core value protocol to make sure that we don't fall into an 'empire' attitude.

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would affront your intelligence.

I am a print addict. I have an ebook and a computer but I remain hooked on print.

A bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.

Don't let the good things of life rob you of the best things!

A sleeping bag is a tortilla for a human.

The history of the world is the history of a few men who had faith in themselves