Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.

I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.

For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.

Of course I loved books more than people.

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

What better place to kill time than a library?

I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.

Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.

Never squander money, opportunity or a good wife. They all tend to end up in the hands of someone who won't.

I know nothing of writing books properly. I write in the same manner I live life: one feeling at a time. If this makes me a bad writer, then I might hope to author several bad books.

I've never compromised who I am not ever. If I've gotten anywhere in my life it's been on my own merits.

Will an intelligent spectator not admire the prodigeous structures of Stone-Henge because he does not know by what law of mechanics they were raised?

People say, 'Don't you get tired of people coming up to you all the time?' But what's wrong with strangers saying they love you?

Youth is the time for adventures of the body, but age for the triumphs of the mind.

So far as I know, there were no pains taken to preserve secrecy on this subject; that is, I saw no attempt made to keep any of the inmates of the Convent in ignorance of the murder of children.

Fighting is a sport; if you're not humble it's going to bring humbleness to you.

The money one gets for selling one's soul is always spent in deadening one's conscience, so the net gain at the end of a lifetime is no greater than if the diabolic bargain had not been struck.