When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
I feel like there's so much darkness in all of my books.
Emotionally, I have no picture-book illustrated with memories of my first five years, but externally, I have impressions that possess a haunting vividness comparable only to the texture of dreams, when dreams are tumultuously alive.
When my mother talked about her brother, there was this light in her eyes. I thought, 'This is the basis of a novel.'
People always tell me my books are so dark; I don't think they're particularly dark. I'm not like that. I'm quite a cheerful soul.
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
We're made for the light of a cave and for twilight. Twilight is the time we see best. When we dim the light down, and the pupil opens, feeling comes out of the eye like touch. Then you really can feel colour, and experience it.
I was the person who stayed awake reading by the nightlight until the scary shadows made me crazy.
The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.
In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold.