56 quotes found
Author · English
English author
“Of course I loved books more than people.”
“What better place to kill time than a library?”
“I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.”
“For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.”
“No one can hold you to a decision made in the middle of the night.”
“A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.”
“Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string t...”
“All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get wont be the truth: it will be...”
“I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.”
“... [They] took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again, after death has stopped us all in its tracks.”
“Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. ...”
“Everybody has a story. Its like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you cant...”
“The imagination is a healthy thing, and a great many scientific discoveries could not have been made without it, but it need to be harnessed to some serious object if it is to come to anything.”
“All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the ...”
“I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills...”
“When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The...”
“My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, 'Me next! Go on! My turn!' I have to select. And once I have chosen, the ...”
“The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was t...”
“Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.”
“When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, dont expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking s...”
“Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a...”
“For at eight oclock the world came to an end. It was reading time. The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.”
“I have closed my study door on the world and shut myself away with people of my imagination. For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have...”
