I believe in books that do not go to a ready-made public. I'm looking for readers I would like to make. To win them, to create readers rather than to give something that readers are expecting. That would bore me to death.

Writing is a struggle against silence.

Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.

Diplomacy in a sense is the opposite of writing. You have to disperse yourself so much: the lady who comes in crying because shes had a fight with the secretary; exports and imports; students in trouble; thumbtacks for the embassy.

There are people whose external reality is generous because it is transparent, because you can read everything, accept everything, understand everything about them: people who carry their own sun with them.

Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.

Religion is dogmatic. Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.