I’ve nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.
… [They] took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again, after death has stopped us all in its tracks.
A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.
There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime you have to draw the line somewhere.
When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.
Our clients’ faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.
Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.
For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.
For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.
My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.
The imagination is a healthy thing, and a great many scientific discoveries could not have been made without it, but it need to be harnessed to some serious object if it is to come to anything.
Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.
When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.
We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delinaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. I know, he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.
Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?
Politeness. Being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else.
In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant.
But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.
She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.
No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.
People with ambition don’t give a damn what other people think of them.
…but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.
No one can hold you to a decision made in the middle of the night.
A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.
You leave the previous book with idea’s and themes – characters even – caught in the fibers of your clothing – and when you open a new book, they are still with you.
You have to relax, write what you write. It sounds easy but it’s really, really hard. One of the things it took me longest to learn was to trust the writing process.