Your weak point is the open, vulnerable place where you can always be hurt. Love, in all its aspects, opens the self so fully.

Journalism encourages haste ... and haste is the enemy of art.

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.

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.

I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society?

One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.

My friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that is enough.