I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.

For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth".

One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.

Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot.

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.