..the writer's obsession - the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.

I realised the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying.

Fear is the touch of death, death reminding us of its existence.

Justice was revenge wrapping itself in a cloak of high principle.

The world is like an enormous set of scales. When evil begins to outweigh good, angels cram themselves in on the lighter side. You can't see them, but there they are, restoring the balance.

Every few seconds a new book sees the light of day. Most of them will just be a part of the hum that makes us hard of hearing. Even the book is becoming an instrument of forgetting. A truly literary work comes into being as its creator's cry of protest against the forgetting that looms over him, over his predecessors and his contemporaries alike, and over his time, and the language he speaks. A literary work is something that defies death.

Man is afraid to attain what he longs for, just as subconsciously he longs for what he is afraid of.