Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.

I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.

Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity

It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

For a fight to be productive, or at least relevant, writers should fight over different demands they put upon writing (as an individual, private act) and literature (a network of relations in which we are all involved).

I have a hard time imagining a country or a government where I would say, "Oh, this is good," where I could live under a government that I respect for a day or a week, even to see what it feels like.