Literary Destiny Quotes

I looked up towards the immensity of the labyrinth. "How does one choose a single book among so many?" Isaac shrugged his shoulders. 'Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person...destiny, in other words.

Books seek us out. They slip themselves into our hands just at the time we are ready for a new self-concept.

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.

I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.

Books have their destinies like men. And their fates, as made by generations of readers, are very different from the destinies foreseen for them by their authors. Gulliver's Travels, with a minimum of expurgation, has become a children's book; a new illustrated edition is produced every Christmas. That's what comes of saying profound things about humanity in terms of a fairy story.

I knew early on that I was going to be a writer. I think it's something rather like a curse that you're born with.

I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.