When I'm filling notebooks I'm trying to pin down what I'm really interested in and to find those details that are so hard to come by, details that I can look at and believe are right on the mark. Things which bring a novel to life. They can take a while to come.

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

To write? Because all this is going to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.

You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.

You can write about other people and their ideas and life without having lived it, but even your perception of that is going to be colored by what you know and what you experience. And this is undeniable.

The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.

I like to write about certain things that if they are not written about are not going to exist.