When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.", The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

We are the Library, " Coppelia pointed out. "What we don't know, we research.

There are atheists and Christians, and there are people in both groups who are a little too heavy-handed.

As an actor, that's the best thing you can do, really take people along on a story and tell them something.

Some people take 10 years to write a book and some can do one in under a year.

Do you know New York stifles me? It makes me so unhappy. There are so many things I want, and so many things I cannot afford to have. I don't see how people ever have money enough to live here.

That's one of the things about the Tea Party people. They think corporations have too much influence in American life and they do.

I don't think I've ever prayed in my entire life, never sat and had an imaginary chat with God.

What has six balls and screws Texans? The Texas Lottery.

I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes.

Necessity gives the law and does not itself receive it.