“And something else, of course; there’s always more, deep in art’s pockets, far down in the chiaroscuro on which these foodstuffs rest: everything here has been transformed into feeling, as if by looking very hard at an object it suddenly comes that much closer to some realm where it isn’t a thing at all but something just on the edge of dissolving. Into what? Tears, gladness—you’ve felt like this before, haven’t you? Taken far inside.”

“This is what I think. You can’t have everything at once. Like the pockets in your clothes, there’s a limit to how much we can have at once. There are times when to put something in your pocket, you have to throw something else away. You have to prioritize those decisions by yourself. There are things that you can’t get back once you’ve thrown them away.”

“If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it andpush it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before,push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm ofmagic.”

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

“Malevolence is born of negative feelings like loneliness and sadness and anger. It comes from an emptiness inside you that feels as if it's been carved out with a knife, an emptiness you're left with when something very important has been taken away from you”

“all my life i have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper just running down the edges of different countries and continents, looking for something.”