We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.

Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.

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

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.

I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

My skin was the border between the world and me.

Europe has never been a monolithic space, it contains a lot of people, a lot of languages and infinite supplies of history. I didn't need to do anything to showcase diversity. It is a condition of life and art in Europe, contained in every random sample.