Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

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 have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.

Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.

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

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.