Isn't life strange? There are people who have so many leftover clothes they can't stuff them all in their wardrobe. And then there are people like me, whose socks never match.

Age certainly hadn't conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russian writers have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.

If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen.

I'm a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.

Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist.

Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything's possible when it comes to love.

I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It's a parallel thing in me.