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The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

I often reread books I have written.

I love to reread, even more than I like to read, so keeping a hold of books that I adore is very important, although they flee from me - they are always fleeing.

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.

When I'm working on historical books, I'm much more organized. I usually read about 100 books to get the depth of knowledge I need.

This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.

I try not to recommend too many books, frankly, because I think there's a certain synchronicity that happens when people discover books.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

I keep an ongoing list of my fifty favorite books, which I recalibrate whenever I discover a new one that seems to demand a spot there.

Books are our umbilical cord to life. They connect us deeply, and with more meaning, to the world. They aren't about escaping from ourselves but expanding ourselves and finding within us the tools we need to survive.