I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.

He tried to imagine the sound of the color red.

Don't tell me about the world. Not today. It's springtime and they're knocking baseball around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball.

For those without money, the road to the treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library.

In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable.

Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting.

More than anything, it's a game of innocence. Politicians may come and go, but they always get booed at the ballpark.

It's odd being an American now. Most of us are peaceful, but here we are again, in our fifth major war of this century.

The library is a place where most of the things I came to value as an adult had their beginnings.

This is truly marvelous work full of mystery, nostalgia, joy, The Color of Whimsy.

The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia

Develop a strong opinion about yourself so that you don’t accidentally start believing what others say about you.

How can you possibly do everything you want to do in life if you start doing a bunch of things twice?

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

I would say that the whole way that I have approached the body is as a space, not a thing - not an object to be improved, idealised or whatever, but simply to be dwelt in.

O Death the Healer, scorn thou not, I pray, To come to me: of cureless ills thou art The one physician. Pain lays not its touch Upon a corpse.

Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.

I prefer my prose evocative rather than simply effective, with a bit of poetry to it.

Fulfillment is often more trouble than it is worth.

One of the things that benefited me that anyone can learn is classical technique. That shows the orchestra that exists within the instrument.