When I’m writing I don’t want anyone else in the room – including myself.

If it’s not good enough for adults, it’s not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the...

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map...

Life isn’t simple. Literature shouldn’t be either.

The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which...

The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.

It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream–a grotesque and foolish dream....

There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.

Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt.

I congratulate you on your success stealing the painting.

The sign of a good novel is what it can cause its reader to see, even if this lies beyond the author’s own vision.

Geography and mileage mean nothing. Separate is a single word that covers all distances that aren’t together.

The curious fact is that biology tells us nothing about desire. And, when you think about it, culture — novels, movies, opera, and quite a lot of painting — is about desire, how we manage...

Đối với tôi văn chương không phải là một cách đem đến cho người đọc sự thoát ly hay sự quên, trái lại văn chương là một thứ khí giới thanh cao và đắc lực...

Prayer is an insurance policy that you can never lapse on.

I’ve always felt that the performance of a raag resembles a novel – or at least the kind of novel I’m attempting to write. You know,’ he continued, extemporizing as he went along, ‘first you...

I do feel that literature should be demystified. What I object to is what is happening in our era: literature is only something you get at school as an assignment. No one reads for fun,...

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind…The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist,...

…and it is also possible, that Saadat Hasan dies, but Manto remains alive.

A writer’s mind is a place where demons fight angels in disguise.

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside...

Five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other.

I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how...

If you have a big heart, you will live a large life.

A book isn’t a single, static thing with one unarguable meaning. Each reader who comes to it brings his own special knowledge, habits and attitudes. Each reader reads a different book. Each reader imagines a...

A man may be ‘dated’ in the sense that the forms, the set-up, the paraphernalia, whereby he expresses the matter of permanent interest, are those of a particular age. In that sense the greatest writers...

I think that the thematic, formal history of the literary form ultimately harkens back to a different political system. That is to say, a feudal order: the aristocratic dispensation of leisure time, the refinements of...

That cloak of love you were wearing—he’s torn it to shreds, undoing the seams of trust that held it together. How can you ever wear those shreds?

Eğer kederlenmek istemiyorsan, kendini üzüntüye kaptırmamalısın. Ne kadar az kaygılanırsan, kaygılanacağın konu da o kadar azalır.

Allah herşeyi görüyorsa niçin bütün dertleri bir tek kişinin omuzlarına yüklüyor? Bir parça insaflı olamaz mı?

Annant is Pickwick paperless, the hunter of wisdom and due to Lovelace heart, a budding poet-ass.

Pinapakita nyong mga dayuhang libro pa rin at mga dayuhang libro lang ang tinatangkilik ng mga tao. Bakit magsusugal ang mga publisher sa Pilipinong manunulat kung hindi naman pala mabili ang mga kwentong isinusulat ng...

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

Deliver thunder, GodIf you choose not to talk.

A big desire is not enough to meet the expectations of lost dreams.

I travel, always arriving in the same place.

The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a...

The world is a navy in an empty ocean.

With your goal you make the one.

Be aware of the high notes, of the blissful faces and their soft messages, and listen for the silent message of a highly decorated gift.

Nobility is not only in forgiveness.

We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.

Stars are only the rain of the Absolute.

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement … It is trembling on the edge. A little less – and it would lose its poetry. A little more – and it would be over into the abyss,...

Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.

On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order...

The way contemporary literature is emerging, soon we can expect “Item poetry” in novels.

There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a...

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nosebetween the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.