Being somebody: it's one of the ideas in life, no? That's what my father made clear to me. The importance of being somebody. He wanted to be somebody. And he underlined to me the fate of trying to be somebody and not quite managing to do it.

Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits.

Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit. We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see. Children must live, must triumph. Children must die; that is an idea we cannot accept.

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.

Amplitude is a powerful quality in fiction. It results in involvement, in sympathy with the characters. After a while, a reader can't avoid being involved with a book, caring about it, even if it's not a particularly good book. You're in it, and you're committed to it.

The summer has ended. The garden withers. The mornings become chill. I am thirty, I am thirty-four -the years turn dry as leaves.

It's just that it's hard to believe in greatness.