“His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!”

“I want to type one of my books into a free online translation website, and convert it from English to German and then publish the results as an exercise in the absurd.”

“Flowers lead to books, which lead to thinking and not thinking and then more flowers and music, music. Then many more flowers and many more books.”

“Unfortunate and wretched are those who have respected a book they did not love and hated those they did.”

“...indeed it is in the General Cemetery that the results of progress are set out before the eyes of the studious or the merely curious, there are even those who say that a cemetery like this is a kind of library which contains not books but buried people, it really doesn't matter, you can learn as much from people as from books.”

“This book, for me, is less an exercise in recall than exorcism.”