All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things that children usually do to amuse themselves. I never aged out of it.

The New Testament has had a really powerful effect on how I write and how I live my life.

It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the pale new growth on an evergreen, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the colour of our kids’ eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live. Unless you know there is a clock ticking.

There are those of us who believe that under certain conditions the cruelest thing you can do to people you love is to force them to live. There are those of us who define living not by whether the heart beats and the lungs lift but whether the spirit is there, whether the music box plays.

I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.

When men do the dishes, it's called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life.