If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.

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

The difference between the world of pictures and the world of printed matter is extraordinary and hard to define. A picture is like the masses: a multitude of impressions. A book on the other hand, with its linear advance of words and characters seems to be connected to individual identity.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.

I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let's not say men. Let's say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.