Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.

Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.

If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.

There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.