“Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.”

“The lecture theatre - the place where information passes from the notebook of the lecturer to the notebook of the student without necessarily passing through the mind of either.”

“The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can life the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.”

“What place would that be, a whole world without roads? It was a panicking thought. A world without roads! He would go nowhere in such a place. He would be trapped where he was, he would have lived out his life only where he was born.”

“I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.”

“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.”