The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose

Those who write need that "willing suspension of disbelief ", as Coleridge called it.

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.

It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.

He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.

The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.

In order not to cut out a large part of one's private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.