Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born…Yet that is not so. Human lives are...

I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at...

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of...

…but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.

Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest...

All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the...

How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only memories that hover on the border. There are all sorts of phantasmagoria...

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

I don’t pretend reality is the same for everyone.

I’ve nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when...

For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.

I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not...

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the...

But pecuniary interest is clearly not in your nature. How quaint. I have written about people who don’t care for money, but I never expected to meet one. Therefor I conclude that the difficulty concerns...

All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto...

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.

Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic....

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...

I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as...

No one can hold you to a decision made in the middle of the night.

Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters...

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...

When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks...

There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to...

As one tends to the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read...

Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?

My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, ‘Me next! Go on! My turn!’ I have to select. And once I have...

My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there...

In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant.

The doctor’s wife wasn’t a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too...

Politeness. Now there’s a poor man’s virtue if ever there was one. What’s so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it’s easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite....

My father never put a book into my hands and never forbade a book. Instead, he let me roam and graze, making my own more or less appropriate selections. I read gory tales of historic...

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.

… [They] took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again, after death has stopped us all in its tracks.

People with ambition don’t give a damn what other people think of them.

He has described in precise, measured words the beautiful desolation he feels at the close of novels where the message is that there is no end to human suffering, only endurance.

Politeness. Being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else.

Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that...

She had not had the relief of amnesia. She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia,...