“You could allow a gentleman the privacy of his piss.”

“What do you think people want, if it's not greatness and to be remembered for all time?""Mostly? I believe people want to eat a good lunch, and then take a good piss.”

“Yet I stake a claim, I am here, for I must be somewhere. But only as a child it seems, struggling to understand what every wife and gentleman passing on the street seems to know by rote. Whom to love, whom to castigate.”

“How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.”

“Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.”

“He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.”

“Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin, see it in your mind’s eye and smell it with your mind’s nose! But forming these images from the printed page is a skill you have to develop when you’re fairly young, I think, or else it’s very difficult to read for pleasure later on.”