Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't keep reading your work.

There are ways of dying that don't end in funerals. Types of death you can't smell.

If I have left a wound inside you, it is not just your wound but mine as well.

This is the extent of his knowledge of the sea: it was very big, it was salty, and fish lived there.

That's how people live in the real world: forcing stuff on each other.

I didn't want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that's a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I'm proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.