A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.

The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.'

A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.

Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party.

I do some eccentric dancing.

I have written some of the clumsiest, most clogged-yet-vagrant, hobbledehoyish, hitch-slipping sentences ever conceived by the human mind.

I heard on public radio recently, there's a thing called Weed Dating. Singles get together in a garden and weed and then they take turns, they keep matching up with other people. Two people will weed down one row and switch over with two other people. It's in Vermont. I don't think I'd be very good at Weed Dating.

I just think lots of words have physicality. How about the word 'wobble?' You think that's arbitrary? When you say the word 'wince,' you wince. How about that?

I like weeding, but I tend to think of it as a solitary activity.

I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is.

People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realize that it has its own cape, sword and little hat.

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves.

Think about scary movies: There's a fine line between horror and humor.

To me, letters have always been a robust medium of sublimation. I don't remember what I was like before I learned my ABC's, but for as long as I can remember I have made them with my fingers and felt them in my bones.

We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods.

When I weed, I like to get off into my own head. For one thing, my wife plants and I have trouble telling which plants are weeds and which are my favorite plants. So I tend to hop around and grab the weeds that I know are weeds. So I don't weed all that linearly. I tend to weed haphazardly.

When money gets too far away from actual, physical, real equity and property it gets too abstract and too distantly derived and then suddenly it's not worth anything anymore. And the same is true of language.

A good heavy book holds you down. Its an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.

My favorites growing up were always Billy Joel, Michael Jackson... and Placido Domingo.

Some people believe everything they see on TV. People, it's called tel-lie-vision!

When I turned 25, something changed in me. I see children in my future 100%. Soon. I started thinking I want my kids to look back and say, 'Wasn't Mummy amazing?' I've really started thinking about what I'm leaving for them.

A negative mind will never give you a positive life.

The ultimate reason for setting goals is to entice you to become the person it takes to achieve them.

People cannot change their tidying habits without first changing their way of thinking.

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

So no one should rely on television either for their knowledge of music or for news. There's just more going on. It's an adjunct to the written word, which I think is still the most important thing.

I stand in the way of no one's ambition. I only ask that no one stand in the way of the people's well being and the nation's progress.

He that dies pays all debts.

I'm three-quarters Russian, so I've always felt an outsider. But I don't think you can be in a play with John Of Gaunt's 'This sceptred isle' speech and not feel proud to be British.

In the Catholic tradition, the idea of giving something up on a Friday - the act of self denial - has always been tied with being generous to those in need.

With 'Greenberg,' I wanted to make a movie about Los Angeles... my great love for it and also the way that I felt not at home and alienated there.

The desire to learn is valuable, but the desire for an education is priceless.

It is not truth that matters, but victory.

The 'Game of Thrones' wardrobe department is so detail-oriented.

It is not the situation that makes the man, but the man who makes the situation.

I played volleyball for the greater part of my life, since I was 11 or 12 years.

I love fake people provided they are mannequins.

This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.

Charlie Parker is my greatest inspiration as a saxophone player - anything that involves him entails a large amount of respect.

I believe in limited government. I know what the welfare state has done to the black community.

Unlike fiction, which you create before you go into production, with reality you kind of create it after everything is produced. The drama and the storytelling is really done in post.

I can read music, but I have no technique, and singing was never an option even though I sang a lot growing up.