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.

I used to put on sketch shows at boarding school when I was eight. I'm not sure about the material, but it did used to get a laugh.

I think among the retired FBI agents there are some who would not like to see him come back, but I think the people running the FBI now are interested in catching him.

I never had a better role than I had in 'Little Miss Sunshine.' That was one of my favorite roles ever.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

I just keep my cars to myself.

In India we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.

Wicked men obey from fear good men from love.

The 1890s was an intensely patriotic decade for Americans. It was a time of neo-imperialism, when the European powers and the United States were establishing their flags around the globe.

When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it's like giving them emotional oxygen.

I avoid talking before the youth of the age as I would dancing before them: for if one's tongue don't move in the steps of the day, and thinks to please by its old graces, it is only an object of ridicule.

Saliva has testosterone and estrogen. When you kiss, you're having a chemical experience.

The mass incarceration going on in this country and with my people is crazy.

If you're not prepared, and you're not passionate, and you don't push yourself to a level of human exhaustion on every level, mentally and physically and creatively... I've seen directors who approach it casually, and they do somehow maintain better hours... but I could never be that guy. I am up and editing all night.

Deception is a cruel act... It often has many players on different stages that corrode the soul.

There's a lot of very funny people I'd love to work with that I've never met, of course. I love Steve Martin and Jim Carrey.

I decline all noisy, wordy, confused, and personal controversies.

I decided if you're lucky enough to be alive, you should use each birthday to celebrate what your life is about.

I still find that a kind of stricture of the heart happens when I see any form of bigoted or racist behaviour. I get an actual pain in my heart.

When walking through the "valley of shadows," remember, a shadow is cast by a Light.

I think a lot of us who grew up in Northern Ireland weren't politicised enough, frankly.

Every member of Congress is sent to Washington to represent all of their constituents, regardless of their age, race, social standing, or sexual orientation, and I believe that America should be a place where everybody can dream, and nobody is left out.

You don't need to know what an antioxidant is to eat well.

Being biracial is sort of like being in a secret society. Most people I know of that mix have a real ability to be in a room with anyone, black or white.

Making movies has become such a golden ring, and it's all such a big business, that the rewards system has gotten totally out of whack. Suddenly, you're treated in a manner befitting someone who is actually an important person.