The only selfish life is a timid one.

After every ''victory'' you have more enemies.

Each book is a different staging post on the writer's journey, and each book stands by itself, regardless of the writer's relationship to it.

When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.