I blush easily. I have difficulty meeting people's eye, difficulty with public speaking, the normal afflictions of the shy, but not to a paralysing degree.

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.

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

The pursuit of a greater self is a holy-being.

But let the good prevail.

Enough small empty boxes thrown into a big empty box fill it full.

I like Bach. I like Randy Newman.

You're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't. I think that's old Europe.

There can be no mass movement without some deliberate misrepresentation of facts.

You see me, I wanted to be fashion designer. I became fashion designer. So I think that everything is possible.

The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees

Give me the splendid, silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling.