I actually didn't listen to the Beatles song 'Nowhere Man' when I was writing my book of the same name. What I listened to a lot was 'Abbey Road.' Its disjointedness and its readiness to confuse only to delight were inspiring to me.

All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.

Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn't seem that bad.

Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.

I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters.

I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability — the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.

I've never meditated for a moment in my life. I don't know how it works. But one of the things you have to do to put yourself in the meditating mode is stop narrating yourself to yourself.