It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity

I think all writing is done through memory

A good smoker, like a good lover, always takes his time with a cigar.

Many of my books have begun with the title, because naming a work already in progress makes no sense to me.

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.