Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.

When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day.

I don't think it's possible to write a good novel around a negative personality.

I like to compare my method with that of painters centuries ago, proceeding from layer to layer.

In life there are no problems, that is, objective and external choices; there is only the life which we do not resolve as a problem but which we live as an experience, whatever the final result may be.

It is what we are forced to do that forms our character, not what we do of our own free will.

A writer survives in spite of his beliefs.