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

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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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When a writer dies, he becomes his books.

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I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

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

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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

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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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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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Paradise will be a kind of library

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

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Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order...more

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