I was able to read a movie before I was able to read a book

When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader

My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.

I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself

Puns are a form of humor with words.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.