A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

Of course you keep telling yourself there's something to be learned from everything, and growing old shouldn't be that hard. That's the general drift.

Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.

My imagination is a kind of animal. So what I do is keep it alive.

The facts and techniques or whatever they teach you in class isn't going to be veryuseful in the real world, that's for sure.

Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells.

An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind. .... Something incredibly important - .. - had disappeared from Miu for good. Leaving behind not life, but its absence