I wanted to apprentice myself to the dailiness of the war's beginning phase. It's truer and more frightening that way - when you're afloat on a little dingy in the midst of it all.

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.

People know what they do

Life is a long agonized illness only curable by death.

Fear of change was a weakness

It has been left to our generation to discover that you can move heaven and earth to save five minutes and then not have the faintest idea what to do with them when you have saved them.

Money shows [man] new ways to cheat life. Power becomes exterior instead of interior. In these circumstances architecture becomes too difficult, building too easy.

You have to accept the fact that some people are never going to be for you. Treat them with respect, but you don’t need their approval to fulfill your destiny.

It seems to me at this moment that laughing is a serious thing, that it connects us with truth and love and God.

The nakedness of the indigent world may be clothed from the trimmings of the vain.

Dear, dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms?

The world around us is in a sea change, and I think the glory of art is that it cannot only survive change, it can lead it