A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

The minute you become conscious that you are doing good, that's the minute you have to stop because from then on it's wrong.

To be human is to be in a story.

Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.

The language of labels is like paper money, issued irresponsibly, with nothing of intrinsic value behind it, that is, with no effort of the intelligence to see, to really apprehend.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along.

I was the goldfish that leapt out of the bowl.

Life is all getting used to what you're not used to.

we are, in this country, more open to new ideas. But we are also, it seems to me, more inclined to hail the new as absolute truth - until the next new comes along.

We tend to think of future inventions and discoveries, but in reality, these things already exist in the knowledge bank of the universe.

I want to be two people at once. One runs away.

There are worse things than eating the dead, my dear fellow. Far worse things. There is, for instance, making a huge profit out of their funeral, which is the normal custom in the civilized world.

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.

Learning a language represents training in the delusions of that language.

Reality is just a point of view.

You don't want to live your life and then meet someone. You want to share your life with someone. That's what I'm missing right now.

It's easy to sound good. All you do is leave in the parts where you act tough and forget the parts where you get shoved around.

I think country has the biggest melodies ever.

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.