For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

Certainly I've never tried to imagine what the future will hold. It's a hopeless endeavor to try to do such a thing.

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

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