Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.

The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.

Book tours are excellent things, and one is lucky to get to go on one, but they have a way of leeching away one's will to live.

You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.

The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.

A big silvery janitor. Penny, this can’t be how the universe works.” “In the Order we call it ‘inverse profundity.’ We’ve observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.