Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

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.

A writer of any merit does not worry about being accepted everywhere. He must write to inspire, to change for the better or to challenge the status quo!

Most good decisions that a person make are a result of reflection and the will to change.

Canadian hockey players always find a way to get along.

I have great confidence in Taiwan's democracy.

Only the contemptible fear contempt.

Sometime, somewhere you take something to be the truth. But if you cling to it too strongly, then even when the truth comes in person and knocks on your door, you will not open it.

All of a sudden you realise that you are the person who has control of your life.

Good writing is deceptive in that it hides its own artifice - it makes it seem easy.

When Allah grants us the sense to ask Him for forgiveness, then He has granted us a huge favor. It's a sign that He wants to forgive us.

Other families bought automobiles; we had a horse-headed hitching post in front of our house and drove horses.