Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

Trust me, I'm telling you stories.

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

The Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. 19th-century novels are fabulous and we should all read them, but we shouldn't write them.