You need the art in order to love the life.

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.

I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.

Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.

But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.

Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

I just tripped over a pair of shoes and almost fell down and broke my neck and no I wasn't wearing them.

...to imitate Western civilization in its spirit, its mode of life and its social organization is impossible without dealing a fatal blow to the very existence of Islam as an ideological proposition.

The independence of the economic sphere was a tenet of faith with Liberalism.

Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.

You don't want to remake something that's just been made, as an actor.

What we think of Christ influences our thinking and controls our actions.

There's many more films being made in America than there are in Australia. You make four hundred and fifty films a year, we make twenty-five.

You ain't never seen nothing crazier than this n - -a when he off his Lexapro.

The true value of sport is more than the skills that young people learn.

He who shall hurt the little wren Shall never be beloved by men.