I'm a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible.

Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future.

You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.

It's tremendous: this world, this life. Take it while you have it.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don’t.

The normal economic system works itself.

I'd given up everything to be a writer, and if I didn't then go on to do that - to write - then I didn't know what would happen to me.