“A good book has no ending.”
“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.”
“Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
“History is written by the winners.”
“I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.”
“Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.”
“Quotation Books: To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism.”
“The difference between a fairy tale and a war is that one starts 'Once upon a time.”
“What is a mother? In The Brothers Karamazov, a promiscuous lady gets pregnant. After the baby is born, she puts it in a box and hides it behind a wall. When the police arrive, they find three more boxes. Would you still call her a mother?”
“Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like foie gras.”
“The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you the knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.”
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
“Reading history makes people wise, reading poetry makes people smart, mathematics makes people meticulous, natural philosophy makes people sophisticated, ethics makes people dignified, and logical embellishment makes people eloquent.”
“Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.”
“Then something woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.”
“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of eternal youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is; and this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.”
“One of the strangest things in the world is that you can read a page or many pages of a book while thinking about something completely unrelated.”