Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory

I don't belong to any side. What's more, I think flags are nothing but painted rags that represent rancid emotions. Just seeing someone wrapped up in one of them, spewing out hymns, badges and speeches, gives me the runs. I've always thought that anyone who needs to join a herd so badly must be a bit of a sheep himself

...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.

Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, one can confuse compassion with love.

Whether we realise it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favouring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act.

The world's very small when you don't have anywhere to go.