I discovered that seventeen-year-old girls have such huge verbal energy that their brain drives them to expend it every twenty seconds. On the third day I decided I had to find her a boyfriend – if possible, a deaf one.
It’s hard work, writing, you know. Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you’re constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it.
I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.
Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.
Some like to believe it’s the book that chooses the person.
Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.
Delving into the past had unveiled a cruel lesson – that in the book of life it is perhaps best not to turn back pages; it was a path on which, whatever direction we took, we’d never be able to choose our own destiny.
In principle I’m an atheist, although in fact I have a lot of faith.
He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.
I can’t die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I’ll have a whole lifetime in which to die.
I’ve always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don’t have a brain.
Nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered.
Whoever said that childhood is the happiest time of your life is a liar, or a fool.
They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they’d been dealt or to the way they had played them.
As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows.
Nobody had noticed, nobody had paid attention, but, as usual, the essential part of the matter had been settled before the story had begun, and by then it was too late.
Money is like any other virus: once it has rotted the soul of the person who houses it, it sets off in search of new blood.
You end up becoming someone you see in the eyes of those you love.
Childhood devotions make unfaithful and fickle lovers.
In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.