The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.

It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.

Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.

...eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness.

the cemetery is the home of those who are not here, come in.

Reading is solitude.

The difference between the true and the false is only a prejudice of ours.

With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get the smell of beer off you, like all the drinkers whose graves I have to dig.

Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons.

If I am killed, I can die by once; but to live in constant dread of it, is to die over and over again.

You can fool people some of the time, but you can't fool them all of the time.

I'd like there to be less refugees. I'd like all girls to go to school. That's what we need to be thinking about, and working on making our own families good and strong and our own kids happy.

As my mom always said, 'You'd rather have smile lines than frown lines.'

Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.

There swift return Diurnal, merely to officiate light Round this opacous earth, this punctual spot.

Whereas for me, touring tends to be a very strange and isolating experience.

There was no way to know that certainty would one day become a luxury, too.