You're either in love with what you do, or you're not in love.

Libraries are the center of our lives. There's no use going to a university if you don't live at the library.

Why then you're as mad as me. No, madder. For I distrust 'reality' and its moron mother, the universe, while you fasten your innocence to fallible devices which pretend at happy endings.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love.

Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.

We have too many cellphones. We've got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

...We're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big. When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, someday it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be.