I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional ... My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their family situation, and everything. But I try to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world.

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

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.

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

The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world

It just happened. As though a moment comes when it's both necessary and natural to make a decision that has long since been made.

If each one of us could make just one other happy, the whole world would know happiness.