You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps the life of the world is held together by invisible chains of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people, depart! And we can only repossess them in our minds.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.

I'm beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn't make sense, how could it happen?

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.