“The bookcase was filled with computer games, history books, and sci-fi novels in about equal proportions. Odd reading choices, maybe, but I just thought of it as past and future history.”
“Maybe Rachel was right all along. Maybe the past is past, history is history, and you just push it aside and look for the future.”
“I just got a fortune cookie that says "Turn off your computer and read a book" which is odd because I'm WRITING a book...on my computer!”
“I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.”
“The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait."(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)”
“What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.”