I am a totally public person.

That's important to me, to recommend books.

Listen she said, everything ends, every single relationship you will ever have in your lifetime is going to end.... I'll die, you'll die, you'll get tired of each other. You don't always know how it's going to happen, but it is always going to happen. So stop trying to make everything permanent, it doesn't work. I want you to go out there and find some nice man you have no intention of spending the rest of your life with. You can be very, very happy with people you aren't going to marry.

Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.

He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it.

Staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

I love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people, take bad books away from people, give them better books.