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.

We never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.

There are three ways you can get along with a girl: one, shut up and listen to what she has to say; two, tell her you like what she's wearing; and three, treat her to really good food...If you do all that and still don't get the results you want, better give up.

In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.

It seemed to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.

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.

Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match.