Books became my world because the world I was in was very hard.
I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.
The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.
This morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart.
There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.
I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won’t publish me, the bookshops won’t carry my books, the critics won’t write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.
I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers.
I have this weird obsession about buying books and looking at them with a smile, even if I won’t read them soon. At least they are mine now.
Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.
If I’m engrossed in a book, I have to rearrange my thoughts before I can mingle with other people, because otherwise they might think I was strange.
Ordinary people simply don’t know what books mean to us, shut up here. Reading, learning, and the radio are our amusements.
Ordinary people don’t know how much books can mean to someone who’s cooped up.
While fiction is often impossible, it should not be implausible.
A man who has not enough originality to think out a new title for his book will be much less capable of giving it new contents.
To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.
To read a book is to hold an entire world in the palm of your hand. That world is unique to you; no two readers can ever inhabit the same world.
If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad ones; for life is short, and time and energy limited.
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
Any book, which is at all important, should be reread immediately.
Vedas are the most rewarding and the most elevating book which can be possible in the world.