All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.

Cynicism is cheap - you can buy it at any Monoprix store - it's built into all poor-quality goods.

He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.

Melodrama is one of my working tools and it enables me to obtain effects that would be unobtainable otherwise; on the other hand I am not deliberately melodramatic; don't get too annoyed if I say that I write in the way that I do because I am what I am.

Those who marry God can become domesticated too - it's just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word Love means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and Ave Maria like dearest is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world's marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves - it was God's taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.