The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world.

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

The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world.

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.

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

Trotsky rises to give me his hand, then sits at his desk, gently allowing his regard to light on my person.

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