“Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to stay in their hotels and fuck one another”

“By now, I probably preferred secondhand books to new ones. In America such items were disparagingly referred to as “previously owned”; but this very continuity of ownership was part of their charm. A book dispensed its explanation of the world to one person, then another, and so on down the generations; different hands held the same book and drew sometimes the same, sometimes a different wisdom from it.”

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.”

“my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened, like the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us”

“It is important to understand that in the modern world we prefer the replica to the original because it gives us the greater frisson. I leave that word in French because I think you understand it well that way.”

“I am only a literary lizard basking the day away beneath the great sun of Beauty. That's all.”

“Tertullian said of Christian belief that it was true because it was impossible. Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.”