Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.

I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.

The only things I truly keep are those things that I give away.

Freedom is born of self-discipline. No individual, no nation, can achieve or maintain liberty without self-control. The undisciplined man (or woman) is a slave to his own weaknesses.

The greatest thing in style is to have a command of metaphor.

When you see somebody actually be able to channel that into an accessible, beautiful tool, you start to see the craftsman behind it.

Generally, or at least very often, people with a deep interest in animals are the best people around.

Chashkin Sar was virgin, and we climbed it for the first time, and afterwards, the people renamed it as Samina Baig.

I cannot write to anyone outside myself--if I tried, it would be a horrible story, flat and lifeless. I write to myself. That's the only person I'm trying to please.

Minnesotans hate zeal. Zeal is right up there on the list of suspicious emotional behaviors like joy and despair. Always err on the side of blandness.

I think it would be a threat [Donald's Trump presidency] to the conduct of our foreign policy and our position in the world at large.

Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.