When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

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.

The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.

All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say "There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived."

Sometimes you get out from behind the wheel and let someone else step on the gas.

Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.

Being a dad is more important than football.

A LeBron James team is never desperate.

I am a freeman, an American, a United States Senator, and a Democrat, in that order.

The love of science to rival the love of woman, in its depth and absorbing energy.

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

We need a commander in chief not a professor of law standing at a lectern - the lectern.