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...readers were born free and ought to remain free.

The way we view fiction is a reflection of how we define ourselves as a nation. Works of the imagination are canaries in the coal mine, the measure by which we can evaluate the health of the rest of...

Many things change with time, but certain basic human traits remain eternal: curiosity and empathy, the urge to know and the urge to connect.

It is amazing how everything can fall into a routine

A novel is not an allegory...it is a sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to...

We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract film with no subtitles and censored out of recognition. There was a sense of wonder at being in a...

..., under circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of all that defines you as an individual. The only thing that makes this immense loss tolerable is the discovery of a self you did not know existed -...

The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and nationality. His true country, his home, was that of the imagination.

The most important result of the encounter {in the preceding anecdote} is the scholar's startling discovery of the roundness of the earth . . . Instinctively realizing the connection between the...

Only Catherine has the capacity to change and mature, although here...our heroine pays a dear price for this change. And she does take a form of revenge on both her father and her suitor: she refuses...

I always had a hankering for the security of impossible dreams.

Imagination and the journey-quest is at the heart of every life well-lived

Against the onslaught of consumerism, against all the overwhelming siren voices that beckon, our only weapon is to exercise our right to choose. And to make the right choices, we need to be able to...

Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.

Don't let strangers touch you. And yet it is seldom strangers, I learned long before I was a teenager, who do you harm. It is always the ones closest to us: the suave chauffeur, the skilled...

Our patents' old age shocks us in the same manner that our children's growth to maturity does , but without the joy.

My impulse now, as then, is to disagree. The majority of people in this country who haunt bookstores, go to readings and book festivals or simply read in the privacy of their homes are not traumatized...

fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another.

So many people, he thought, don't listen to the content of what you say but only to the noises you make.

Did you feel guilty cursing God--you, of all people?'No,' he said. 'Because even in doing so, I was recognizing there was a greater power than me.

The dissolution and sale of British Rail, transforming it into a disjointed network charging exorbitant prices for an unimproved and still taxpayer-subsidised service, darkened the joke a bit much for...

I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there.

In fiction, every treachery and setback appears to serve some end: the characters learn and grow and come into their own. In life, it is not always clear that the hijacking of our plans is quite so...

Is it possible to write a reverent novel," said Nassrin, "and to have it be good?...

This is what Tehran truly means to me: its absence seems more real and profound than its presence

incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.

In his forward to the English edition of Invitation to a Beheading {1959}, Nabokov reminds the reader that his novel does not offer 'tout pour tous.' Nothing of the kind. 'It is,' he claims, 'a violin...

{"What is the most real thing you can think of?"}Jacques thought for a long time before answering; he tried to weigh up what was most vital and enduring in all that he had known. Eventually, no longer...

To an outsider, building a school before there was a medical clinic, or someone to deal with the problems of hunger and homelessness, was illogical, but Farmer and Lafontant understood that the school...

He sniffed, and said as others had before him and others no doubt would again, I have learned never to say, 'Never again.

I do believe in God. I think God has given so much power to people, and intelligence, and said, 'Well, you are on your own. Maybe I'm tired, I need a nap. You are mature. Why don't you look after...