If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.

No matter how long you stand there examining yourself naked before a mirror, you'll never see reflected what's inside.

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

The honour of physical decline is waiting, and you have to get used to that reality.

I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you.