"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."

"Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea."

"I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred."

"A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book."

"All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened."

"If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work."

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

"[At a minimum, this will hit consumers' pocketbooks—and perhaps their confidence. Before Katrina, Goldstein estimated that consumers' annual fuel bills this year would average about $250 more for gasoline and $400 more for home heating oil and natural gas than in 2004. Now he reckons those amounts will go up 30 percent to 75 percent. Costlier energy could adversely affect consumer spending, corporate profits and inflation—or all three.] We could be reaching a tipping point on consumer psychology, especially when people get their home heating bills, ... Those will be big."

"To be simple is no small matter."

"Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions."

"I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book."

"Good books are as friends, willing to give to us if we are willing to make a little effort."

"Whatever books you may read, you cannot realize the Divine merely by intellectual effort. One must put it into practice. That sense of oneness can only be promoted by the practice of love and not by any other means."

"Through the media of films, books, music and the behavior of elders, young minds are excited and aroused into indulgences."

"Obviously, we've only seen parts of things. And the book itself doesn't come out until the end of the month, but we'll review everything that there is to look at."

"One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures."

"The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics."

"Learning comes from books; penetration of a mystery from suffering."

"It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."

"Sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty."

"Books are a narcotic."

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us."

"A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity." [Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]"

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."