But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weig...
Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul—it showed you who you really were. The wizard couldn’t look at it wi...
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. All of them? Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown ...
It seems to me now that the past belongs to those who have the self-possession, or the arrogance, or enough sheer determined longing, to stamp their own particular imagination history. It was no use wondering what I would have put in this room wee it...
Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn’t as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social...
I must give due praise to the man who first extracted morphine from poppyheads. He was a true benefactor of mankind. The pain stopped seven minutes after the injection. Interesting: the pain passed over me in ceaseless waves, so that I had to gasp fo...
She looked at her note cards and took a breath. "Why I Love America, by Hayley McDonald's. America is the greatest group of countries in the world because we have freedom. In countries like France, where the Government isn't privatized, they still ha...
I rummaged through the drawers in search of a strong poison. I thought of nothing as I looked; I had to get it over with as quickly as possible. It was as if it were an everyday task I needed to do. All I could find were things of no use to me: butto...
Her bed felt huge and empty now, and when she slept, she did so with her arm around a pillow. She dreamed of him almost every night, sometimes good dreams of happy days and joyful times; often they were terrible dreams of abandonment, loss and sorrow...
All of the dissatisfactions he had felt in his practice of the art form he had stumbled across within a week of his arrival in America, the cheap conventions, the low expectations among publishers, readers, parents, and educators, the spatial constra...
BERNARD. (To DONALD.) Donald, read any new libraries lately? DONALD. One or three. I did the complete works of Doris Lessing this week. I've been depressed. [. . .] BERNARD. Some people eat, some people drink, and some take dope. DONALD. I read. MICH...
Poetry restores language by breaking it, and I think that much contemporary writing restores fantasy, as a genre of writing in contrast to a genre of commodity or a section in a bookstore, by breaking it. Michael Moorcock revived fantasy by prying it...
Sorry, Bex," Jason said "You don't have the recognizable facial characteristics - such as a huge chin, or a large amount of real estate between the eyes - that would merit the bestowing of a criminal mastermind nickname such as Lockjaw or Walleye. Wh...
Cal: “Yesterday I was stuck in a car with you for eight hours.” Bastard. I didn’t even sing along with the radio. Much. Me: “Yeah. And?” Cal: “Something happened.” Me: “If you’re referring to my driving skills, may I just say I didn...
What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering--that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some...
One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The g...
Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white pa...
There is one key area in which Zuma has made no attempt at reconciliation whatsoever: criminal justice and security. The ministers of justice, defence, intelligence (now called 'state security' in a throwback to both apartheid and the ANC's old Stali...
Listen, I'll share some of the wisdom I learned over the years. When you near the end of your life... when you're a lonely old man... you start realizing what your accomplishments are really worth. The most brilliant clue I ever deciphered, the milli...
Sometimes I open a book that’s so beautiful I have to shut it because it hurts me. I can’t stand it. It’s like, Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! This is going to drive me into my own heart. A day or two days later I’m saying, All right, and I just surren...
There are many things I don’t know, but quite a few I do. I know you can’t be lost if you know where you are. I know that life is full of precious and fragile things, and not all of them are pretty. I know that the sun follows the moon and makes ...
