I'm a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple.

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.

One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them.

Lecturing is an art. A good lecturer is an artist who understands the art.

Kayso, it turns out that driving an actual car is way harder than it is in 'Grand Theft Auto: Zombie Hooker Smackdown.

I'm not a registered Republican or Democrat. I don't even vote.

Progress is cumulative in science and engineering, but cyclical in finance.

The closest friends I made all through life have been people who also grew up close to a loved and loving grandmother or grandfather.

Perhaps for totemic reasons, people like to possess a piece of the country they are visiting. Women like to wear it. Men like to eat it.

I actually got a nice surprise about being a mother because I expected it to be harder and to have to make more adaptations.

There is a way between voice and presence, where information flows. In disciplined silence it opens; with wandering talk it closes.

I don't want children. Why should I let some strange little monster into my life to destroy what to me is a perfect set-up?