It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.

Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.

It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.

Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.