Yet the fact had no consciousness of itself except through me.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

The unavoidable harshness of life surprised none of them, for they were Christians one and all, believing that they inhabited a fallen world, albeit one filled with God's grace.

... Hoping like hell she was wrong about Dominic, and he was just a secretive man with a strange skin disorder.

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

Kortchnoi's heritage is many-faceted - over the decades he has several times corrected and changed his style. But the main thing has invariably remained his search for chess truth.

It was the day my grandmother exploded.

We live in a cold, cold world.

I think that has a lot of dangers, as does government surveillance, which is way too high.

When a Wall Street analyst or broker expresses optimism, investors must take it with a grain of salt.

I think the whole obsession with old gear is completely overblown. You don't need old-fashioned gear to make a great-sounding record. You don't even need [analog] tape.