Animals have one thing that puts them way ahead of people: they don't dissemble, and you don't have to pretend in front of them.

Most people can't imagine a life that is any different from the one they are actually living. They can dream about it, they can even go into the streets and demonstrate for it, but they still can't imagine what it would be like.

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.

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.

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

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

Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.