People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.

It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition.

All things in my novels are real for me. Some western critics said that Garcia Marquez's novels are magic realism. However, I believe that Marquez must have experienced everything in his novels.

A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world. Alone in this fun house, only I grow old, a pale softball of death swelling inside me. Yet even as I sleep somewhere between Saturn and Uranus, wind-up birds everywhere are busy at work fulfilling their appointed rounds.

No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.

When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don't. And when they're running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them.

We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.