Unfortunately many young writers are more concerned with fame than with their own work... It's much more important to write than to be written about.

How strange women are.

They looked like two children," she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she'd always felt that only children are capable of everything.

In the beginning, when the world was new and nothing had a name, my father took me to see the ice.

I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.

The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.

Life in the world... was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder. The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown.