Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason.

Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.

It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre--the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list.

The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.

The only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an ... urgent deadline in the offing.

So I suppose I do not know how he really looked, and, in fact, I suppose I shall never know, now, for he was plainly an object created in the mode of fantasy. His image was already present somewhere in my head and I was seeking to discover it in actuality, looking at every face I met in case it was the right face - that is, the face which corresponded to my notion of the unseen face of the one I should love, a face created parthenogeneticallyby the rage to love which consumed me.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.