It's a gift of tranquility when your adult desires mesh with your childhood background. I don't quite know why mine didn't, although I think books, again, are partly to blame.

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.

Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.

The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're "decoding

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.

The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.

Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in.

Those straight-spined parishioners could justify their exhibitionism by telling themselves that they were setting an example, even educating the rest of us.

Reading, my earliest refuge in the unknown world, made me want to venture into it.

One of the many drawbacks of this "I teach what I am" approach is that it stifles classroom discussion. Any disagreement with the professor's expertise comes off as an ad hominem attack.

Generations of readers, bored with their own alienating, repetitious jobs, have been mesmerized by Crusoe's essential, civilization-building chores.

I figure we go through things that make us stronger, but we also go through things that just simply piss us off.

The areas off the greens are masterpieces. I don't think there's anything like it in North America.

It's the little things that count, hundreds of them.

There's an absolute prejudice that good movies are dramas and comedies are more dismissable. But I couldn't disagree more.

Leave me in a room with some crayons and I'll draw on the wall.

I believe in America. America's made my fortune.

Actually, I very much dislike routine. Creating music is my chaos therapy. The writing process puts me in a good place. Recording the music is the release of however I felt in the song.

If we say that religion is a virus, then why isn't science a virus?

You don't quit because you happen to be behind. You want to see how you do. And who knows? Maybe somebody will stumble.

I've made more movies than anybody now.