When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

The minute you become conscious that you are doing good, that's the minute you have to stop because from then on it's wrong.

To be human is to be in a story.

Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.

The language of labels is like paper money, issued irresponsibly, with nothing of intrinsic value behind it, that is, with no effort of the intelligence to see, to really apprehend.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along.

I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl.

Life is all getting used to what you're not used to.

we are, in this country, more open to new ideas. But we are also, it seems to me, more inclined to hail the new as absolute truth - until the next new comes along.

I gave you up and died a little each day

There's no labor a man can do that's undignified-if he does it right.

The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living.

I had a job when I was 16 at a gas fitter, which was a bit like a pipe fitter.

The entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region is melting, and it has all happened in the last three or four years.

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.

I don't really know how to live my life, just like lots of other people don't. I guess you just learn along the way.

The thing that people associate with expertise, authoritativeness, kind of with a capital 'A,' don't correlate very well with who's actually good at making predictions.

With a written agreement you have a prayer; with a verbal agreement you have nothing but air.

Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.