We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land.

As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.

The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.

You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.

I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul.

Deciding what is being talked about is a kind of interpretive bet.

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.