[President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.

You realize that these accidental decisions you make about changing jobs, about moving into an apartment where you make new friends and confidants, about going to one city over another, that sometimes they're completely arbitrary decisions that you haven't put as much thought into as perhaps you should have, and yet they change the course of your whole life.

My father really, really pushed me to excel in a way that I resented for years and then realized had really worked for me.

Figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience.

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life. And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed.

It is so easy to waste our lives: Our days, our hours, our minutes ... it is so easy to exist instead of live.