Everything is surprising, rightly seen.

One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.

I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

I watch a lot of sport on television. I only watch certain sports, and I only watch them live - I don't think I've ever been able to watch a replay of a match or game of which the result was already decided. I feel bound to cheat and look up what can be looked up.