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The cleanest book on a dusty bookshelf is usually a dirty one.

A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.

I can't imagine writing a novel without some sound. When you're facing a few hundred blank pages, silence can be cold.

When a locked-room mystery doesn't work, the solution makes you groan, and the book gets hurled across the room.

Erudition - that is, reading, writing, and arithmetic - is taught in the schools; but where is the more important quality, character, taught? Nowhere in particular. There is no authorized training for children in character.

At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.

A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.