The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.

Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.

A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.

If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents.

A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space.

If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

I read books to read myself.

Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. ‘There’ was then; ‘here’ is now.

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

We might not be equal in what we know but we are surely equal, in what we do not know.

Never in the history of mankind has pride succeeded in putting food on a hungry man's table.

Whoa, wait a minute, Coletrane. Are you proposing to me?”“Well I would if you’d let me finish, ” he grumbled.

A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.

The heroes of Flight 93 won the first battle in the War on Terror, and they should never be forgotten.

I love the saliheen (pious people) even though I’m not one of them, and I hate the taliheen (evil people) even though I (may be) worse than them.

I'm coming back in... and it's the saddest moment of my life.

Making money doesn't oblige people to forfeit their honor or their conscience.

The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.

It's lovely being a parent and being in a strong marriage with somebody who is your best friend.