What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.

I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things – once commenced – only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending – sweet or sour – and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?