You tell a kid he doesn't like to read, and he'll believe you

You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?

I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart.

It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.

Diving is a leap of faith plus gravity.

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works

We aren't the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.

Let's stay young forever. Young, stupid, and pretty. Sounds like a plan, don't you think?

Death is a state of mind---many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.

They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.

In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know. For everyone else, it's just another end.

But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects.

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

We should let our godliness exhale like th odor of flowers. We should live for the good of our kind, and strive for the salvation of the world.

Between work and your kids and your spouse or whatever situation you have in your life. I think balancing all of that seems to be a huge situation.

One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods.

Fermentation equals civilization.

Love is God and God is love, no one's below and no one's above.

I know President Obama and Secretary Clinton are committed to bringing America together. This needs to be a time of redemption, not a time of recrimination.

We don't have rights until we claim them.

The intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.