The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.

Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.

I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

Waiting for things to happen is like daydreaming. To break out of that cycle, you must be willing to take the first small step.

There is a rhythm to our language. they echo the rhythm of our life.

If you are you, 24 hours a day, then you do not have to remember who you are supposed to be in different situations - something that I imagine could be troublesome.

I don't really shout that much.

The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.

What's been great about the human race gives you a sense of how great you might get, how far you can reach.

I just try to focus on the basketball game and not get caught up in all the media.

There are no unresourceful people, only unresourceful states.

I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be re-affirmed.