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.

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.

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

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.

I have made love to ten thousand women.

Madame....gloatingly savored her words as earlier she had savored her pig's trotter.

I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong.