The greatest solitude

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

Malibu: With sounds of waves crashing, and the ocean at the doorstep, you feel like you are hours away from civilization. And with L.A. traffic, YOU ARE.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

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.

My voice falls into Southern drawl when I am tired, drunk, or in trouble. Too often, my accent is attacked by all three of these realities.

True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.

Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.

Literature is news that stays news.

The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.

Goals are dreams with a deadline.

There was, I think, a prevailingimpression common to the provincial mind, that his misfortune wasthe result of the defective moral quality of his being a stranger.

In other words, the more stupid one is, the more he thinks he knows.

The first forty years of life give us the text the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

People who were really good at playing or singing seemed boring to me.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

Physicians ought not to give their judgment of religion, for the same reason that butchers are not admitted to be jurors upon life and death.

Democracy has not failed; the intelligence of the race has failed before the problems the race has raised