I never cared about money.

You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

Very often history is a means of denying the past.

We're living in a homogenized culture where everything is the same, and books are not a homogenized culture. They are extremely varied, and they're eccentric because they are the product of an individual mind. They are not, in any way, mediated.

The only selfish life is a timid one.

There's a whole generation growing up thinking you shouldn't seek knowledge for its own sake, and that theatre and art and books are activities that you do after-hours, rather than things that are at the heart of life. That's a huge change.