I have two rules in life - to hell with it, whatever it is, and get your work done.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.

It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.

I have spent my life going from mania to mania. Somehow it has all paid off.

Kill two birds with one stone, feed the homeless to the hungry.

But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.