Everything has boundaries. the same holds true with thought. you shouldn't fear boundaries, but you also should not be afraid of destroying them. that's what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries. what's really important in life is always the things that are secondary.

I don't know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned.

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.

It is however, difficult to make your narratives relative by yourself. A novelists' work is to provide models to make your narratives relative. If you read my novels then you may feel, "I have the same experience as this narrative", or "I have the same idea as this novel". It means that your narrative and mine sympathize, concord and resonate together.

You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.

Understanding' is merely the sum total of our misunderstandings.