If you feel . . . that well-read people are less likely to be evil, and a world full of people sitting quietly with good books in their hands is preferable to world filled with schisms and sirens and other noisy and troublesome things, then every time you enter a library you might say to yourself, 'The world is quiet here,' as a sort of pledge proclaiming reading to be the greater good.

The sad truth is the truth is sad.

Every time you enter a library you might say to yourself, "The world is quiet here," as a sort of pledge proclaiming reading to be the greater good.

You can't believe everything you read.

The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth both have first-person voices, and I ended up investigating those voices and investing so much in them that I think many people took them more seriously than they ought to have.

The trouble with talking about irony is, it's such a slippery thing that the second you start talking about it, you're a better example of it than you are an analyst.

One cannot spend forever sitting and solving the mysteries of oone's history.