When you're sure of what you're looking at, look harder.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

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.

The busy snoops like us can leave no stone unturned, " Alma said.

Whatever you have in mind do, for the Lord is with you.

If you don't follow your dream, who will?

For the scientific acquisition of knowledge is almost as tedious as the routine acquisition of wealth.

Prayer is an exchange. We leave our burdens, worries and sin in the hands of God. We come away with oil of joy and the garment of praise.

The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms.

Young children are being arrested and subjected to court appearances for behaviors that can only be termed as trivial.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

The good thing about having a kid is you don't think about that as much. Like when I turned 30, for instance, that was much more momentous. Forty is particularly great for a woman. It's a big thing.

I think the bait for doing something really is always the part.