When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you’re going to...

I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually...

I wish I’d known those words on the day I watched those German troops land, plane-load after plane-load of them—and come off ships down in the harbor! All I could think of was damn them,...

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.

Gıli Gıli duygularını yumuşatmak için balkondaki kırık kiremitlerin arasına sakladığı ojesini çıkarıp defalarca soludu. Oje kokusu ruhuna yayıldıkça gövdesi hafifledi.

The ”text” is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Irma, she said. But I had started to walk away. I heard her say some more things but by then I had yanked my skirt up and was running down the road away from her...

How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It’s like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.

I never want a girl to lose all hope that her life can’t completely turn around, even if she feels that she is at the edge, standing on one foot, and ready to say goodbye.

One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety.

A word (…) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (…) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.

We have invented the literature because the reality wasn’t imaginative enough and we also wanted to be alone, at least for a while!

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around...

Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There’s not enough time.

When I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her...

..if you could forget mortality… You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making,...

If you cannot be a sun that illuminates the light, be a moon that never tires of reflecting the light.

Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I’d started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn’t matter and...

You only benefit from books if you can give something back to them. What I mean is, if you approach them in the spirit of a duel, so you can both wound and be wounded,...