Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you've watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you.

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.

Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is insomnia.

My relationship with shoes has always been linked to shoes, women, women in their shoes and performance.

Homophobia whether internalized or externalized is really fear; it's not hatred, it's fear. It's fear of the truth about ourselves.

There is a social need within our lives as human beings to have harmony.

I only ask of the government to be treated as all other men are treated.

Life without absorbing occupation is hell; joy consists in forgetting life.

If thy words be too luxuriant, confine them, lest they confine thee; he that thinks he never can speak enough may easily speak too much. A full tongue and an empty brain are seldom parted.

There are two types of people in the world, those who say 'there are two types of people in the world' and those who don't.

I've met a lot of pin-up girls, but I've never been able to pin one down

An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.