One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.

We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written.

If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.

One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.

The telling of stories creates the real world.

Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.