A personal library is a bank for the mind, each book a deposit, which bears interest.
Epochal breaks, driven by technological developments, are always accompanied by a great purging of memory. The future must always murder the past, like Zeus must kill his father, or Macbeth Duncan.
To make everyone equal is to destroy them; intensity and interest in human relations arise through difference.
Great literature is at its core the struggle of individuals against a system; the lives of writers themselves follow this pattern too.
Reading about how the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva befriended Arseny Tarkovsky, the father of Andrei, shortly before her suicide. I always discover these hidden links between great artists when I read biographies; the world of genius is very small.
For the first time in my life I’m drawing more from my own experience than the books I read…