“I am not a lucky person, but I am a person blessed by God for what I have and I got.”

“I despair of ever getting it through anybody's head I am not interested in bookshops, I am interested in what's written in the books. I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.”

“i am going to bed. i will have nightmares involving huge monsters in academic robes carrying long bloody butcher knives labeled Excerpt, Selection, Passage, and Abridged.”

“I personally can't think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book.”

“I am quitting a boy like some people quit smoking. I am not quitting smoking.”

“Most often, we walk without understanding this movement, without hearing its step, but knowing that we must go beyond an emptiness in us, and that only then our walk begins. In these moments, I think of the desert, of you.Suddenly the beating of a bird's heart; that alone breaks the air. Behind me, steps I know I made but which the ground did not retain. I wanted to learn thirst. Sand is this infinity that passes through us slowly ever since a beginning that we cannot name. Stripped of itself, the world restores its whiteness which, alone now, upholds the memory I am remaking. Detached, I am still trying to see if there is someone.My flesh melted in the desert.”

“But I don't know, maybe it's just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: "It's there.”