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 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.

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.

History isn't a seesaw. If you have a really bad regime on one side, the actions on the other side don't automatically become good. It doesn't work that way.

To you I am neither man nor woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me--the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.

And in the end you will realise that everything you did, you did for you and for the people like you...

All things acceptable to God the Father must come from God the Son, whether us or our works.

After a lifetime of wanting to be loved, she didn't think she could bear it if it finally happened just before she was about to die.

It does make me sad that there's a lot of great songs out there, and they're not going to see the light of day because they're competing with these tailgate songs.

Well, I'm too old to pimp, and too young to die, so I'm just gonna keep playin'

As an artist, I've been very fortunate.

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.