When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents.

I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.