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History proves that most writers get forgotten anyway. That's very likely to happen to my books, and if I'm extremely lucky, maybe one of my books will survive.

It breaks my heart that we are always being nudged toward the most recently published books, when so many worthy books have gone unexplored.

I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.

On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors - mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust.

I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn't a reader yet has just not found the right book.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they're threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit.

Very wonderful books might be published, and very terrible books might be published.

The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.

Negative books can be bestsellers, but seldom classics.