“Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.”

Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.

But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.

I re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life.

Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.

For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It’s a challenge to the powers that be. It’s saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.

So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.

No one ever expects poetry to sell…

I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing.

The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.

One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.

I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection.

The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world.

Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.

Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.

Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I’ve mentioned, of course, are original, but it’s important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world.

I want to point out, that this is not my fault that everyone’s afraid of me, because I did not kill a couple people the other day.

You know, to be completely disgusted with injustice to the point that you will have to take some huge leaps of faith. And it may take one person leading many.

Whether it’s teaching me a new way to cut on a wave or teach me a three-point conversion or teach me how to dribble a soccer ball. There’s something really cool about that.

I’d like to point out to people the divine in a musical language that transcends words. I want to speak to their souls.

They’re probably not any more complex or interesting than their good, law-abiding cousins, and I’d always tend to see things from their point of view.

The society was so different [in China] – it was a feudalistic society. It didn’t come to a point of industrial revolution until twenty years ago.

I am not one of the new media experts working all the time with my computers and the PowerPoint’s and things of that sort.

The Afghans can’t point and say, “Oh, the Americans built that road. They built that telecommunications facility.