There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.
There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.
A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.
What better place to kill time than a library?
All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.
I know there are people who don’t read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.
What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?
A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else’s story.
Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.