I’ve always thought of myself as shy.

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.

The world grows ever complex. More urban. Less peaceful.

Laughter nibbled at my lips like tiny fish in warm water.

If you think your job is to fix what is broken, you keep finding more broken places to mend.

It's an exciting place to go, really. The rain, the drizzle, the cold, the depressing people, the smokes in the bath ... I don't know of anyone who has been to Blackpool and enjoyed it.

I have recognized that the nation has the right, if it so wills, to vindicate her freedom even by actual violence.

As I moved to less and less diverse places in my life, I realized that white people dont talk about race amongst themselves!

Need A Six In Pressure Situation? Call MS DHONI.

Here's to all volunteers, those dedicated people who believe in all work and no pay.

The world sits quiet, as if sighing and taking a long inhale after what seemed like forever with mankind and the noise pollution.

I am too old and stiff-necked to change my memories now.