What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.

Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.

It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.

One should never underestimate the power of books.

If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.

Beth: "What are you, the Energizer Bunny?

You do not know what is better before you have tried what is worse.

Love was like a stock, Lizzie realized. You gambled on its paying off in the long run—but it could just as easily cost you everything.

Or is this how humans survive, shrugging off history, immersing themselves in the moment?

Sometimes desire is air, sometimes desire is liquid. And every now and then, when everything else is air and liquid, desire solidifies, and the body is the magnet that draws its weight.

Every year the inventions of science weave more inextricably the web that binds man to man, group to group, nation to nation.

Know your own happiness.

On this team, we're all united in a common goal: to keep my job.

Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

I can't sit around and wait for the telephone to ring.