Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.

You never came out the way you came in.

God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.

We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.

I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.

What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.

When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.

Bach is thus a terminal point. Nothing comes from him; everything merely leads to him.

Time, dear friend, time brings round opportunity; opportunity is the martingale of man. The more we have ventured the more we gain, when we know how to wait.

You may be right,' she said, a phrase which here meant 'I’m wrong, but I don’t have the courage to say so.

We never cherish what we've got until the day it's gone.

Did we put our kids in 0.5-mile-per-gallon (mpg) tanks and 17 feet per gallon aircraft carriers because we failed to put them in 32-mpg cars?

It is the considered opinion of most members of our rational élites that, in any given difference of opinion with reality, reality is wrong.

If we don't empower women, we don't allow them to unlock the potential of themselves and their children.

He who builds on the people, builds on the mud

I go to bed at 4 a. m. Almost all chessplayers do.

I have won every argument I ever had with myself.