The books you love best - those are the immensity of the sea.

There are times in your life when, despite the steel weight of your memories and the sadness that seems to lie at your feet like a shadow, you suddenly and strangely feel perfectly okay.

The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only so long as they remember us.

People who read Anne Lamott, like people who read Anne Rice, believe that tragedy is romantic, but the people who read Anne Lamott believe it ironically.

There was no one alive who did not contribute his share of mystery to the world.

I write out of gratitude for all the books I have loved over the years.

She had the same responsibility as everybody else did: to live as softly as she could in the world.

Worry is a mean-faced dwarf who beats on your heart like a kettledrum.

I always try to stay as quiet as possible about a book until it's finished.

I had always been the kind of boy who was quick to laugh and quick to cry.

With every sentence she writes, Davis freshens the senses. Her novels achieve a tone that’s unlike anyone else’s, creating an atmosphere you don’t so much interpret as breathe.

For after all, the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain.

War has been the necessary and inevitable consequence of the establishment of a monopoly on security.

I like The White Stripes and I like the kinda twang American thing right now.

I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.

To say I drank my way into marriage isn't much of an exaggeration, and it's none at all to say I drank my way out of it.

Drunk people run stop signs, high people wait for them to turn green

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Rock music is, is a necessary evil, like beating my children with penny loafers

What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.