“If you fictionalized my character, I could live a bit longer.”

“I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am ”

“Outside books, we avoid colorful characters.”

“Children pay little attention to their parents' teachings, but reproduce their characters faithfully”

“Sometimes I discover I have changed my mind because I have forgotten what I used to think.”

“My work is whatever I want it to be, and I report to no one regularly. The head librarian -- the man in charge of the University's entire collection -- is a figurehead, well-to-do and poorly read, with whom I have only perfunctory contact.”

“Books never cease to astonish me. When I was a child, I knew--in the incontestable way that children know things--that God was an author who'd imagined me, which is why I (and everyone else) existed: to populate His narrative. My task was to imagine God in return: this was all He and I owed each other.”