We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.

Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.

If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.

One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.

Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.

I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.

Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.

Unpacking books is a revelatory activity.

If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.

Language is fossil Poetry.

Speak with silence, listen with heart, and forgive with kindness.

Resolution demands a sacrifice.

You’re my friends now. We’re having soft tacos later.

What a wonderful thing it is to have a good friend. He identifies your innermost desires and spares you the embarrassment of disclosing them to him yourself.

Get to know the real you, rather than try to look like or dress like those around you.

In the end, this world will go under because of the stupidity of people.

I finally did work out a very good relationship with my father, but it was rough growing up. We had a lot of conflict, and I think it surfaced in many of my works.

In New York, we tip everyone. We tip doormen, we tip cab drivers, and we tip bartenders at the bar. You'll get quite an evil eye if you don't leave a tip at the bar.

Action often precedes the feeling.