“When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The speed of the pen. The pressure of the hand on the page. Breaks and releases in the flow. You must relax. Think of nothing. Until you wake into a dream where you are at once a pen flying of vellum and the vellum itself with the touch of ink tickling your surface. Then you can read it. The intention of the writer, his thoughts, his hesitations, his longings and his meaning. You can read as clearly as if you were the very candlelight illuminating the page as the pen speeds over it.”

“You have to relax, write what you write. It sounds easy but it's really, really hard. One of the things it took me longest to learn was to trust the writing process.”

“You leave the previous book with idea's and themes - characters even - caught in the fibers of your clothing - and when you open a new book, they are still with you.”

“People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.”

“But pecuniary interest is clearly not in your nature. How quaint. I have written about people who don't care for money, but I never expected to meet one. Therefor I conclude that the difficulty concerns integrity. People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appauling obsession with personal integrity." - Vida Winter”

“The imagination is a healthy thing, and a great many scientific discoveries could not have been made without it, but it need to be harnessed to some serious object if it is to come to anything.”

“Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.”

“The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.”

“... [They] took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again, after death has stopped us all in its tracks.”

“A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.”

“No one can hold you to a decision made in the middle of the night.”