One of the many drawbacks of this "I teach what I am" approach is that it stifles classroom discussion. Any disagreement with the professor's expertise comes off as an ad hominem attack.

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.

Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.

The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're "decoding

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.

The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.

It's a gift of tranquility when your adult desires mesh with your childhood background. I don't quite know why mine didn't, although I think books, again, are partly to blame.

Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in.

Those straight-spined parishioners could justify their exhibitionism by telling themselves that they were setting an example, even educating the rest of us.

Reading, my earliest refuge in the unknown world, made me want to venture into it.

Generations of readers, bored with their own alienating, repetitious jobs, have been mesmerized by Crusoe's essential, civilization-building chores.

‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

A man is likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative and creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.

A writer creates like the sculptor, with one exception: The writer must create his block of marble, before chiseling away the non-essentials.

There's a little known virtue called magnificence: an unostentatious liberality of expenditure in doing good. You would deny me the practice of it. Mierda! I should have left you on the comet.

An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins.

I don't think there is a musician today that hasn't been affected by Elvis' music. His definitive years - 1954-57 - can only be described as rock's cornerstone. He was the original cool.

Creativity Is a fancy word for the work we have to do by Friday.

Los Angeles is peopled by waiters and carpenters and drivers who are there to be actors.

I'm lying. I don't just need someone like you. I need you.

I would live in a communist country providing I was the Queen.