16 quotes
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written, that’s all.
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)
It symbolizes the three components of power: power, power and power.
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)
‘A daring enterprise undertaken in a spirit of curiosity or temerity, it is potentially life-threatening, harbours unforeseeable dangers and sometimes proves fatal.’
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)
Writing is a desperate attempt to extract some dignity – and a modicum of money – from solitude.
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)
Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)
“Regenschein is dead, my friend. You’re delirious.”
“No one who writes a good book is really dead.”
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)
I’m not much of an expert on entomology because most insects fill me with a revulsion in proportionate to the number of legs they possess.
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)
Curiosity is the most powerful incentive in the world. Why? Because it’s capable of overcoming the two most powerful disincentives in the world: common sense and fear.
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)
This was nonsense, of course, but he lectured so brilliantly and plausibly that I could only marvel at his inexhaustible ingenuity.
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)
Yes, yes, but why was it invisible, like everything you had to take on trust? Because it didn’t exist at all?
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)
In my position I simply can’t afford pangs of conscience. Fortunately, they fade the more power one acquires. It’s an entirely natural process.
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)
But his illness never attained the merciful degree of severity that would have entitled him to a spell in a lunatic asylum and absolve him from further work. It wasn’t quite severe enough for a lunatic; only for a writer.
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)
One’s memory functions like a spider’s web. Unimportant things – the wind, for example – a web lets through, whereas captured flies become lodged in it and are stored there until the spider needs and devours them.
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)
His unorthodox didactic method of imparting his monumental store of knowledge was a curious mixture of megalomania and modesty, because he claimed to have picked it up from others. The truth was, he had invented it all himself and never tired, day after day and lesson after lesson, of devising new absurdities that would fire my imagination.
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)
I chewed them as I looked round the room, feeling thoroughly restored. A drink of water and a handful of smoked maggots had sufficed to turn a despairing wreck into a cheerful optimist. It isn’t the brain that governs our state of mind, it’s in the stomach.
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)
Many people may think it is insane of someone endowed with such a potential abundance of power to spend his life producing works of art which no one can see. Well, my own ideas of morality prescribe that only a lunatic would aspire to subordinate the fate of others to his own wishes. I leave it to a higher authority to decide which view is the right one.
The City of Dreaming Books (2004)