#books

"I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints....I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does."

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

"It takes a certain ingenuous faith - but I have it - to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth."

"It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home."

"Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine."

"You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes."

"The best books... are those that tell you what you know already."

"The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you."

"If you really want to be a writer, nobody can stop you -- and if you don't, nobody can help you."

"Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism."

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."

"Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time."

"When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own."

"You don't put your life into your books, you find it there."

"-- that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways."

"Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading – in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow. When this happened, other people in the family couldn't bring themselves to disturb them. All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning."

"Good books are about everything."

"I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves."

"People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it?"[Interview in The Independent, 15 October 2005]"

"Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head."