“The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're "decoding”

“I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.”

“The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.”

“My own mother, who's always dazzled by my faculty and answering questions in the literature a category on Jeopardy whenever we watch it together, keeps urging me to try to get on the show to make a...”

“It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.”

“Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in.”

“Your sacred contribution in the world is the service to humanity.”

“My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products th...”

“After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see hi...”

“Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own wo...”

“I'm a heart surgeon, sure, but I'm just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.”

“Cat, I'll let you in on a little secret. We don't all love our jobs every day. And doing something you have passion for doesn't make the work part of it any easier...It just makes you less likely t...”

“Within what is allotted to us, we can have spiritual contentment.”

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

“He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.”