What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.

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

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

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.

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.

No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.

I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better.