“My library is an archive of longings.”

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

Wherever people feel safe – they will be indifferent.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing – a hand worker in an era of mass production.

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

I’m still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries.

The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.

I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses.

If I write a book where all I’ve ever experienced is success, people won’t take a positive lesson from it. In being candid, I have to own up to my own failures, both in my marriage and in my work environment.

At night I sit in my chamber and read the bible. Far in the distance roars the sea. Then I lie down and think for a long time about the calm and pale man from Nazareth.

I’ve read hundreds of cookbooks. Most of those cookbooks don’t even tell you how to get a steak ready, how to bake biscuits or an apple pie.

Keep good company, read good books, love good things and cultivate soul and body as faithfully as you can.

I was never much of a reader when I was a boy. Books bored me. I liked action. But I spent a lot of time thinking about things. I’d imagine all kinds of situations and how I would handle them.