"

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

"

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes...more

"

When a writer dies, he becomes his books.

"

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

"

Reading . . . is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

"

I've fixed my feelings into durable wordswhen they could have been spent on tenderness

"

If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast—I mean, for the imagina...more

"

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.", The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

"

I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in...more

"

We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes.

"

Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, a...more

"

Paradise will be a kind of library

"

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.

"

All our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and sooner or later e...more

"

Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies make us stop in wonder - and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, di...more