What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

Between the covers of the books that no one had ever read again, in the old parchments damaged by dampness, a livid flower had prospered, and in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated.

his mysterious resources had awakened in her a curiosity that was difficult to resist, but she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love.

He shook my hand and said goodbye with a sentence that might have been either good advice or a threat: "Take good care of yourself.

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

When I wake up," he said, "remind me that I'm going to marry her.

When I sit down to write, which is the essential moment in my life, I am completely alone. Whenever I write a book, I accumulate a lot of documentation. That background material is the most intimate part of my private life. It's a little embarrassing - like being seen in your underwear It's like the way magicians never tell others how they make a dove come out of a hat.