My goal for technology has always been to reach a point where the technological mediation becomes invisible.

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.

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

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.

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas.

When a wife has a good husband, it is easily seen on her face.

The truth is an arbitrary, shifting, culturally relative, and historically molded phenomenon.

My first priority is my family. I am human. But my whole family knows what my priority is. Family is always first. But my work is under nothing else, except God.

There is no duty more indispensible than that of returning a kindness.

We were young, we were merry, we were very, very wise, And the door stood open at our feast, When there passed us a woman with the West in her eyes, And a man with his back to the East.

It is not what a man does that is of final importance, but what he is in what he does. The atmosphere produced by a man, much more than his activities, has the lasting influence.

When you work as an actor, you've got to feel safe even in what appears to be the simplest things.

The constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruption's of time and party, its members would become despots.