It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.