“No novels, since you just read them once and never again.”

“Just as people in zombie apocalypses seem never to have seen a zombie apocalypse movie, so people in novels about the pioneering days of time travel never seem to have read novels on the subject.”

“You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.”

“These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.”

“I'm about to start reading it again, because what good is a story you only want to read once?”

“When you learn to read you will be born again… and you will never be quite so alone again.”

“One of my mottoes as a writer is a little jotting from Kafka's journals: ‘Never again psychology!’ But alas, humankind is obsessed with its psychological workings, and since the novel can only treat of humankind... You see my predicament.”

“If I could read your mind love
What a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel just like the kind a drug store would sell
When you reach the part where the heart aches come the hero would be me
But heroes often fail
And you won't read that book again because the endings just too hard to take..”

“If your house has Cold Mountain poems
They are better for you than sutras
Hang them up where you can see them
Read them and read them again”

“Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…”