You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.

I always told my dad I'd play professional football.

Don’t you want to be alive before you die?

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.