books

"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up."

"Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself."

"The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters."

"Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper."

"A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it."

"Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books."

"A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to."

"The wise man reads both books and life itself."

"Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about."

"it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do."

"The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad"but "good vs. good."

"If I told you that my global audience has shot up 100% in the last six months, what would you say? If you were to say, “So you went from one reader to two readers?” you’d be absolutely correct. And after I had congratulated you on your keen guess, I’d thank you for being 50% of my reading base."

"Books are like friends to me. Words come alive on the page."

"When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before."

"If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you."

"For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time."

"The world exists to end up in a book."

"Books are the mirrors of the soul."

"Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary."

"I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction."