Your first realization when you become an important person is that all day and all night, whatever the circumstances, people want to hear you talk about yourself.

opened the door a crack wide enough for the entire world to pass through .

No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.

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.

He said that love was an emotion contra natura that condemned two strangers to a base and unhealthy dependence, and the more intense it was, the more ephemeral.

He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

There had never been a death so foretold.