Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.

If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

Many are the women who can take their clothes off seductively, but women who can charm as they dress?

My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. “Hold tight,” I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground

There are symbolic dreams-- dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities -- realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councillors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me.