No old house is without its stories; no old house is without its ghosts.
One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambitiin don't give a damn what other people think about them.
One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.
There is no privacy where there are children.
…when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.
…the beginning is never where you think it is.
People with ambitions don't give a damn what other people think about them. I hardly suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying whether he'd hurt somone's feelings. But he was a genius.
I would sooner not tell you. But I have promised, haven't I? The rule of three. It's unavoidable. The wizard might beg the boy not to make a third wish, because he knows it will end in disaster, but the boywill make a third wish and the wizard is bound to grant it because it is in the rules of the story. You asked me to tell you the truth about three things, and I must, because of the rule of three.
People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.
What better place to kill time than a library? And for me, what better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?
For it must be very lonely being dead.
Sometimes a history lesson would touch upon me of the deep but random seams of knowledge I had accumulated by my haphazard reading in the shop. Charlemagne? I would think. What, my Charlemagne? From the shop? At these times I stayed mum, dumbstruck by the momentary collision of two worlds that were otherwise so entirely apart.
For me, to see is to read.
Politeness. Now, there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.
There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.
For me, to see is to read. It has always been that way.
Readers … are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.
Don't be so polite. If there's one thing I can't abide, it's politeness.
Fight fire with fire, people say.