I remember, as a child, the confusion of not knowing what this place was where I was supposed to spend the night: it's a disquieting experience... →
Alberto Manguel
I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way.... →
I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening.
Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in 'Oliver Twist' that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as... →
Henning Mankell
Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the... →
Hilary Mantel
For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated... →
I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date... →
Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may... →
Sometimes you buy a book, powerfully drawn to it, but then it just sits on the shelf. Maybe you flick through it, the ghost of your original purpose... →
A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.