“Dreams of flying have haunted the collective imagination since time immemorial.”

“Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.”

“A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.”

“He had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.”

“Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.”

“In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.”

“What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?”