Alberto Manguel — Argentinian Writer

Alberto Manguel (born 1948 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine-born Canadian anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist and editor. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places , A History of Reading , The Library at Night and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography ; and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came . Though almost all of Manguel's books were written in English, two of his novels (El regreso and Todos los hombres son mentirosos) were written in Spanish, and El regreso has not yet been published in English. Manguel has also written film criticism such as Bride of Frankenstein and collections of essays such as Into the Looking Glass Wood . In 2007, Manguel was selected to be that year's annual lecturer for the prestigious Massey Lectures... (wikipedia)

The telling of stories creates the real world.
A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn't come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages.
I remember, as a child, the confusion of not knowing what this place was where I was supposed to spend the night: it's a disquieting experience for a child. And what I would do was quickly unpack my books and go back to a book I knew well and make sure the same text and the same illustrations were there.
I've never really understood attachment to a place for reasons of birth. That my mother happened to give birth to me in a certain place doesn't, to my mind, justify any thankfulness towards that place. It could have been anywhere.
I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening.