“I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.”

In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.

One always dies too soon – or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are — your life, and nothing else.

Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.

There is only one day left, always starting over: It is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

Life is a useless passion.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have been dragged through I don’t know how many consciences.

I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.

Nothingness haunts Being.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact.

No one has been a greater botanist or zoologist. No one has written more books, more correctly, more methodically, from personal experience. No one has more completely changed a whole science and started a new epoch.

Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It’s the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.

I don’t think anyone should be banned. If you don’t like a book, set it aside.

Every object strives for its proper place. A book seeks to be near its truest admirer. Just as this helpless moth seeks to be near the candle that infatuates him.

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit.