It's troubling to see how often Winston Churchill is a proponent of massive programs that are really aimed at civilians - starvation blockades and chemical warfare stockpiles and so on.

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.

... what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.

As an author I'm in my head all day and I worry that I lose touch with reality. But then my dog pees on my shoe and I know I've found it again.

Oh, if I had only known then what I know now, I would have stopped it last year when I was still young.

No one wants to wait for tracks to buffer or spend hours searching through a Web site to find their favorite song.

Big machines are the awe-inspiring cathedrals of the 20th century.

I believe the test of government is the contentment of the people.

To disregard what the world thinks of us is not only arrogant but utterly shameless. [Lat., Negligere quid de se quisque sentiat, non solum arrogantis est, sed etiam omnino dissoluti.]

I'm much more concerned with being a good dad than a good actor, being there for my children, educating them and hopefully helping them avoid some of the mistakes that I've made.

Once killing starts, it is difficult to draw the line.

Success is often nothing more than moving from one failure to another with undiminished enthusiasm.