If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents.

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.

Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.

A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.

A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space.

If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

I read books to read myself.

The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.

Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. ‘There’ was then; ‘here’ is now.

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.

I think dress, hairstyle and make-up are the crucial factors in projecting an attractive persona and give one the chance to enhance one's best physical features.

But you have to remember in life that there's a positive to every negative and a negative to every positive.

In terms of my own behavior and activity, the funny thing about regrets and saying "I'm sorry," is that there's so much I would do differently and want to do differently moving forward.

Do not do that which others can do as well.

A lion's work hours are only when he's hungry; once he's satisfied, the predator and prey live peacefully together.

I was literally the black sheep of the family, and there were definitely moments of discomfort while my grandmother was working through her racism.

You defended your Medicaid expansion by invoking God.

Ten men in our country could buy the whole world and ten million can't buy enough to eat.

The Lord so constituted everybody that no matter what color you are you require the same amount of nourishment.