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.

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.

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.

The idealist hopes. The romantic sees doom. The postmodernist sees doom and hopes.

We are what we are because of what we've been

A smile is the light in the window that others say that there is care, and sharing person inside.

A mighty pain to love it is and 'tis a pain that pain to miss but of all pains the greatest pain it is to love but love in vain.

I don't think you can shock an audience anymore. Me cutting my head off is a great illusion, but when you turn on CNN and there's a guy really getting his head cut off, it does dilute what I did.

September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression.

Slight sorrow for sin is sufficient, provided it at the same time produces amendment.

But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences - is very, very important to actually being able to make movies.

I do not want to live at the cost of the life even of a snake. I should let him bite me to death rather than kill him.

I must use these great men's virtues as a cloak for my weakness.