Even English Language doesn’t provide you with the Synonyms of the word Success.

It was like hiking into a Hemingway story; everything was sepia-toned and bristling with subtext.

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to...

In the course of time, Michael Strogoff reached a high station in the Empire. But it is not the history of his success, but the history of his trials, which deserves to be related.

If arts and music, precious gifts in themselves, were akin to memory, literature was the self-knowing of the species; the human mind accumulated, a manifest of wisdom and knowledge, self-doubt and awareness, folly and foible,...

Never run upstairs when someone’s chasing you. Don’t try to quick-draw a man who already has his gun out. Never light a match in the dark in a strange building. Half of staying safe is...

I love and hate this place because it is full of words.

It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don’t have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables...

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over...

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne’s vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn’t care about masterpieces, or even good paintings…...

Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn...

There isn’t a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don’t know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.

In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.(Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book.)

The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me–I have no others.

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of...

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become...