I realised the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying.

Fear is the touch of death, death reminding us of its existence.

If we lose our memory, we lose ourselves. Forgetting is one of the symptoms of death. Without memory we cease to be human beings.

Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.

Man is afraid to attain what he longs for, just as subconsciously he longs for what he is afraid of.

Every few seconds a new book sees the light of day. Most of them will just be a part of the hum that makes us hard of hearing. Even the book is becoming an instrument of forgetting. A truly literary work comes into being as its creator's cry of protest against the forgetting that looms over him, over his predecessors and his contemporaries alike, and over his time, and the language he speaks. A literary work is something that defies death.

If you tell anything to a woman ... it's like putting it in the papers.