He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.

A great commotion immobilized her in her center of gravity, planted her in her place, and her defensive will was demolished by the irresistible anxiety to discover what the orange bells and whistles and the invisible globes on the other side of death were like.

and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.

Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.

I don't have a method. All I do is read a lot, think a lot, and rewrite constantly. It's not a scientific thing.

Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.