if a book isn't self-explanatory, then it isn't worth reading.

I haven't got time to read books.'

'What do you mean you haven't got time? What are you doing?'

'Lots of things: studying French, writing a diary, and ...'

'And what?'

She was about to say 'waiting for the phone to ring', but she thought it best to say nothing.

'My dear, you're still very young, you've got your whole life ahead of you. Read. Forget everything you've been told about books and just read.'

'I've read loads of books.

Tears are words that need to be written.

The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, "Oh, the book is better.

Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.