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.

Maybe happiness is like a virus. Maybe it's one of those bugs that sits for a long time, so we don't even know that we are infected.

They who shared none of my defeats should take no pride in celebrating my successes.

People don't need to know what Albert Belle is thinking. I've learned from my mistakes in the past, and that's what's made me a better person.

Ask me that again next month, when you're all in Dhaka and I'm in Rome, watching Chelsea playing Lazio!

I'm just a husband waltzing in the background.

Come on, somebody be brave.

Strike hard and fast and do not separate.

I love God, I love everybody else around me as myself, and I love my enemy.

Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening.

My life is not separate from my music, you know? It's not like a day job that I leave and go home. It's who I am as a person and how I am trying to grow, come closer to God, be a better person.

Real beauty comes from confidence and being who you are, not aspiring to look or be someone else.