The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I'm very polite in person. I don't want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.

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.

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'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.

Know that love is truly timeless.

Some people make you feel worthless. And then there are those who make you feel like a million dollars. Ultimately, it's up to you to decide who you choose to believe.

Good leaders make people feel that they're at the very heart of things, not at the periphery.

In fighting the debt crisis, E.U. countries have enhanced co-operation and carried out reform with tremendous courage. This is laudable.

I wrote about what I was going through at the time.

The American dream is a crock. Stop wanting everything. Everyone should wear jeans and have three T-shirts, eat rice and beans.

For you girl, there is not enough love in the world.

I refuse to be stereotyped.

It is a source of happiness to see the elderly working in their garden or looking from their windows! It is so good to see them alive and well!

Golf is like life in a lot of ways - All the biggest wounds are self-inflicted.