Occupation: Writer Birth: 1948
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries..
We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function..
We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction t….
I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening..
I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read befor….
When literature is discovered, a revelation occurs: the joyful, exultant knowledge that anything can happen..
My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space ar….
Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge..
At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, ….
Life happened because I turned the pages..
Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its ord….
The starting point is a question..
The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned..
Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know..
In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories..
A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading..
Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth..
Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power..
Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certai….
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acqu….
I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will ….