That's really what I want in a leader; I want somebody who's really, really smart.

Decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it; you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.

There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.

[After my mother died, I had a feeling that was] not unlike the homesickness that always filled me for the first few days when I went to stay at my grandparents'' house, and even, I was stunned to discover, during the first few months of my freshman year at college. It was not really the home my mother had made that I yearned for. But I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life.

Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.