Whatever the reasons may be, I was very much affected by events of the 1930s – the Spanish Civil War, for example, though I was barely literate.

To me the ego is the habitual and compulsive thought processes that go through everybody’s mind continuously. External things like possessions or memories or failures or successes or achievements. Your personal history.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back.

I was 14, and I fell in love with Pink Floyd.

I was drafted during the Korean War. None of us wanted to go… It was only a couple of years after World War II had ended. We said, ‚Wait a second? Didn’t we just get through with that?‘

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

I can only say the first thing that pops into my mind is I remember, years ago, seeing kind of a has-been country singer working – when I first moved to Nashville – in a bar in a Holiday Inn.

I can imagine in years to come that my papers and memorabilia, my journals and letters, will find themselves always in the company of people who care about many of the things I do.

We’ve got to dumb America up again.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Nineteen sixty-eight was one exciting moment in a much larger movement. It spawned a whole range of movements. There wouldn’t have been an international global solidarity movement, for instance, without the events of 1968. It was enormous, in terms of human rights, ethnic rights, a concern for the environment, too.

The things hardest to bear are sweetest to remember.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don’t think they’re doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

In fact, you couldn’t give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.

For people who are readers, reading is important to them.

I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

I still have my unemployment books and I remember when I worked for the sanitation department and the post office.

My life is mine to remember.

My relationship with the mountains actually started when I was 16. Every year, a group used to be taken from Auckland Grammar down to the Tangariro National Park for a skiing holiday.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

I remember I used to sleep on my records. In a room with no furniture. I remember I used to sleep in my car.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.

When I was 8 years old, it mattered what my favorite singer said and wore and expressed opinions about.

I remember coming to New York in 1974 to do a play here called ‚Equis.‘ And I remember the first morning getting up and walking around the streets, and I thought, ‚I’m home.‘ I felt really at peace here.

Upon the farm of the uncle with whom I lived, we did know of the mortgage as some dreadful damper on youthful hopes of things that could not be bought. I do have a vivid recollection that the major purpose of a farm was to produce a living right on the spot for the family.

All the learnin‘ my father paid for was a bit o‘ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

When they set off for their first day at their new school, I will never forget that winter morning as I watched our girls, just 7 and 10 years old, pile into those black SUVs with all those big men with guns.

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

We forget our pleasures, we remember our sufferings.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

Libraries raised me.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

I was adored once too.

My parents were divorced by the time I was even conscious – like, I don’t remember them ever being together.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

Remember that the most valuable antiques are dear old friends.

I remember the first time I had sex – I kept the receipt.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression.

Christmas is the perfect time to celebrate the love of God and family and to create memories that will last forever. Jesus is God’s perfect, indescribable gift. The amazing thing is that not only are we able to receive this gift, but we are able to share it with others on Christmas and every other day of the year.

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.

Akron, Ohio, is my home. It will always be remembered. Akron, Ohio, is my life.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.