The Reading Room

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

“A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?”

“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”

“A word after a word after a word is power.”

“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”

“The answers you get from literature depend upon the questions you pose.”

“War is what happens when language fails.”

“The way I understand things, the Bible may have been thought out by God, but it was written down by men. And like everything men write down, such as the newspapers, they got the main story right but some of the details wrong.”

“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”

“If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.”

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made.”

“Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.”

“I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn't believe me but I believed them.”

“Fear has a smell, as Love does.”

“Kill what you can't save what you can't eat throw out what you can't throw out bury What you can't bury give away what you can't give away you must carry with you, it is always heavier than you thought.”

“Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”

“Potential has a shelf life.”

“There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.”

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”

“By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.”

“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”

“Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.”

“Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?”

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”

“What you don’t know won’t hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you very much.”

“Where do the words go when we have said them?”

“Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.”

“Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.”

“As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you're going to say, 'Where did we come from, what happens next?' The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.”

“Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.”

“Human tool-makers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want hasn't changed for thousands of years because as far as we can tell the human template hasn't changed either. We still want the purse that will always be filled with gold, and the Fountain of Youth. We want the table that will cover itself with delicious food whenever we say the word, and that will be cleaned up afterwards by invisible servants. We want the Seven-League Boots so we can travel very quickly, and the Hat of Darkness so we can snoop on other people without being seen. We want the weapon that will never miss, and the castle that will keep us safe. We want excitement and adventure; we want routine and security. We want to have a large number of sexually attractive partners, and we also want those we love to love us in return, and be utterly faithful to us. We want cute, smart children who will treat us with the respect we deserve. We want to be surrounded by music, and by ravishing scents and attractive visual objects. We don't want to be too hot or too cold. We want to dance. We want to speak with the animals. We want to be envied. We want to be immortal. We want to be gods. But in addition, we want wisdom and justice. We want hope. We want to be good.”

“...we must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there's nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”

“Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”

“Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.”

“There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.”

“There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.”

“Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.”

“It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.”

“Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.”

“Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.”

“When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.”

“I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.”

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

“The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.”

“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”

“Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.”

“with shrunken fingers we ate our oranges and bread, shivering in the parked car; though we know we had never been there before, we knew we had been there before.”

“I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, 'Nobody under 40,' or 'Nobody under 25.' With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is 'reader.'”