When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.

You never came out the way you came in.

God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.

We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.

I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.

What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.

Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.

Remember the 11th commandment. Thou shalt not take thyself to damn seriously.

Nobody loves me but mama, and she may be jivin too.

The only death I fear is the one I fell when we're apart.

Everywhere, except in theology, there has been a vigorous growth of skepticism about skepticism itself.

I don't feel like I need to be on an island to be enjoying myself and relaxing.

A good home must be made, not bought.

The administration of government, like a guardianship ought to be directed to the good of those who confer, not of those who receive the trust.

I'm a huge fan of women; I think we're great.

People who copy what exists copy a point-in-time artifact, and if you are managing the process correctly you are already hard at work on the next thing.

I took my sight and mobility for granted.