I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.

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.

Our biggest fear is not in expressing the truth but that we will be attacked or belittled because of our truth.

Trust your weapon, it is almost certainly smarter than you are. Remember this and you may yet live.

We never touch but at points.

Freedom is control in your own life.

I don't believe in proving a point to anybody. Nobody is that important.

Everything that I decide to do means something, otherwise I don't do them.

We're going to protect Christianity. We don't have to be politically correct about it.

I am too inexperienced and ignorant to conduct myself with propriety in this town, where every thing is new to me, and many things are unaccountable and perplexing.

People today are desperate for leaders, but they want to be influenced only by individuals they can trust, persons of good character.

All we have-ourselves-to Him, and if that be all, that is enough.