To Own A Certain Book - And

To Own A Certain Book - And To Choose It Without Help - Is To Define Yourself.

Reading And Life Are Not Separate But Symbiotic. And For This Serious Task Of Imaginative Discovery And Self-discovery, There Is And Remains One Perfect Symbol: The Printed Book.

I'm Interested In Such Things As The Difference Between How We Perceive The World And What The World Turns Out To Be. The Difference Is Between The Stories We Tell Others And The Stories We Tell Ourselves. There Is A Wonderful Russian Saying, Which I Use As The Epigraph Of One Of My Novels, Which Goes, He Lies Like An Eyewitness. Which Is Very Sly, Clever And True.

I'm A Novelist, So I Can't Write About Ideas Unless They're Attached To People.

Sometimes I Think The Purpose Of Life Is To Reconcile Us To Its Eventual Loss By Wearing Us Down, By Proving, However Long It Takes, That Life Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be.