Nicole Krauss Book Quotations

At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I'd end, a great wind would sweep through my rooms carrying the pages away, and when the air cleared of all those fluttering white sheets the room would be silent, the chair where I sat empty.

the shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed, or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it.

Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.

If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.

I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.

To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.

Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad... I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer.

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)

When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.

One is always changing. I don't want to write the same book and I couldn't, because I'm a different person.