If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn’t hassle a browser – and steal the contents of….

We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it..

Taking the things people do wrong seriously is part of taking them seriously. It’s part of letting their actions have weight. It’s part of letting th….

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel t….

If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking s….

I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence..

What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to sha….

Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending - pretending tha….

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across th….

God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity..

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue..

When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth..

You never came out the way you came in..