… remembered summer light, and the luminous inverted ghost of a boy with a parrot on his shoulder.

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

If you start out by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work toward getting it.

I wanted to buy a candle holder, but the store didn't have one. So I got a cake.

Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

Saint Augustine! well hast thou said, That of our vices we can frame A ladder, if we will but tread Beneath our feet each deed of shame.

I can't make you love me, but you can't keep me from loving you.

It is not what we have but what we enjoy that constitutes our abundance.

Was not this ... what we spoke of as the great advantage of wisdom -- to know what is known and what is unknown to us?

Feeding the birds is also a form of prayer.

I like an ending that's both a door and a window.

Science is not gadgetry.