It seemed a good idea at the time.

The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.

Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.

Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.

Human beings are mercifully so constituted as to be able to conceal from themselves what they intend to do until they are well into the doing of it.

I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual.

In these pages your imaginations, your desires, your passions are given life; Thoughts take shape that turn into dreams and our aspirations all start with a dream. Reading is where those dreams really can come true over and over again.