If you write every day, you're going to write a lot of things that aren't terribly good, but you're going to have given things a chance to have their moments of sprouting.

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.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

World history is made by minorities when this minority of number embodies the majority of will and determination.

Don't overdo the booze especially while flying - just because it's there doesn't mean you need to drink it. Everything in moderation.

We particularly like people who value us highly.

You can't really call yourselves giant-killers any more, as you kill giants so often.

America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused - preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.

Southward, two mighty ranges of the Appalachians shouldered their way into the blue distance like tremendous caravans marching across eternity.

People and nations are forged in the fires of adversity.

It’s hard to stay away from religion when you mess with acid.

If your time is worth anything, travel by air. If not, you might just as well walk.