But that was the beauty of this particular game. The moment you lost, you won.

Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of the words is where the meanings begin....Writing as a lesser form of dance.

When a man's only assets are the brain in his head and the tongue in his mouth, he has to think carefully before he decides to open that mouth and speak.

If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics

It was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there. But never really here. And never really there.

I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author.

As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.

As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out

You can’t punish someone for a lack of affection, can you? You can’t force a child to love you just because he’s your child.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.

To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body.

Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on. Perhaps you will remember that. I am...

Every man is the author of his own life.

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

...once you fell in love with her, you loved her until the day you died.

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.

It's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom

You can survive only if nothing is necessary to you

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.

To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.