top of page
.png){kind=small}
"The core " and perhaps unexpected " thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise, and clarify our concerns " and in this sense simplify."
Standard
Customized
More
"I don't have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Some books mirror reality while others are entirely fantasy. My favorite are those that manage to weave both into a world."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Even a book with completely empty pages will change you because you will start thinking about the reason behind this emptiness and once you enter the thinking territory it means that you entered a territory of change!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks."
Author Name
Personal Development
"They want a lip print for their autograph books. I'm a sport; I go along."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all."
Author Name
Personal Development
"My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The proper study of mankind is books."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well."
Work
"I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it."
Success
"Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to."
Books
"We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us."
People
"It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided."
Identity
"We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane."
Relationship
"Loneliness makes us more capable of true intimacy if ever better opportunities do come along. We might be isolated for now, but we'll be capable of far closer, more interesting bonds with anyone we do eventually locate."
Relationship
"There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies."
Society
"Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities."
Mind
"Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself."
Self
bottom of page