A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.

Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.

Until now when we have started to talk about the uniqueness of America we have almost always ended by comparing ourselves to Europe. Toward her we have felt all the attraction and repulsions of Oedipus

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.

Books are messengers of freedom. They can be hidden under a mattress or smuggled into slave nations.

While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.

Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.