Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.