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When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarna

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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

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I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.

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A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.

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

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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

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

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Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on meand treating me badly.

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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

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

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How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

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He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.

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... in art nothing is more secondary than the author's intentions.

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I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an...more

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Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, a...more