Of course, individuals are responsible for individual actions - the pilots who flew over Pearl Harbor and dropped bombs on those ships did a terrible thing as part of an attack on a military base.

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.

Wherever you travel to see beauty, you find yourself and your reflection again and again.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

I'm just a normal guy.

Gracefulness is a correct life: sensuality which contemplates and forms itself.

Why should be elite, music? Excuse me. Music must be for everybody.

Every film is a political act; it's how you see the world.

Endeavour-with most diligent labour, O aspiring artist!-to master content. The form will rise to meet you.

A burning desire is the greatest motivator of every human action.

What I really want is a creative person. You can always hire a Ph.D. to take care of the details.

The main problem in the Christian life is that we have not thought out the deep implications of the gospel, we have not 'used' the gospel in and on all parts of our life.