You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we take to meet on the other side.

I'm dreaming of a month of Sundays.

I thought a vegan diet would be too difficult, being on the road so much, but it's been far easier than I thought.

My mom's always saying really smart things... like, you probably heard this one, 'Why buy the cow when the milk has HPV?' Wish I'd listened to that one.

I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.

She had the kind of fingers you want to interlace with your own.

Me and God we don't get along.

Add little to little and there will be a big pile.

What is a valid reason for someone to love someone else? Since apparently I’m doing it wrong.

There's no need to dress like everyone else. It's much more fun to create your own look.