I readily admit it is easy to make of horses what we will. Silent, in some ways reserved, they allow us to train them, and to project our ideas upon them; to ride and drive them, and to make them symbolic, perhaps to a greater degree than any other species.

Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.

There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.

Horse racing is really much more intimidating than anything having to do with literature. When I had horses at the racetrack, I would wake up in terror in a way that I would never wake up while working on a novel.

I wrote the Dickens book because I loved Dickens, not because I felt a kinship with him, but after writing the book it seemed to me that there was at least one similarity between us and that was that Dickens loved to write and wrote with the ease and conviction of breathing. Me, too.

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.