I have made love to ten thousand women.

If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.

It was night and I could see a large and calm lake, reflecting the moon. Black mountains rose around it. I arrived from between two of these mountains, I looked at the lake and the moon, and that was it, nothing else happened.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.

A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother.

The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn't go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.