"Clara Winter,' he said. 'You are a word person and don't ever forget it.'He was right. He knew. He could tell. It's something that can be sensed. There's a difference between word-people and non-word-people."

"His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore."

"The universe seems to be a lot like a car or a computer, in that it's designed to be user-friendly, which doesn't necessarily require the user to have a clue what's going on under the hood."

"Philologists assure us that żulm in Arabic originally meant 'to put something out of its proper place,' so that all wrong of any kind is injustice, I.E., an injustice against the agent himself) is, therefore, a very common term in the Qur’ān, with its clear idea that all injustice is basically reflexive."

"The rage for swiftness which is so characteristic of this restless time has been extended to fashions of reading. One effect of the modern habit of swift and careless reading is seen in the impatience with which anything is regarded which is not to be taken in at a glance."

"If you're trying to learn how to act from a class, you're analyzing the teachers' movements and their intricacies, and it becomes like a pantomime of you wanting to be them, and that's wrong. Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin. It's your own imagination, and your own version of it."