It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

We tire differently if we love or love not.

A beginning idea for a book might be: a boy emerges from a hole in the ground. He enters a house. The book will take place in the first ten minutes following his arrival.

I believe in discovering the love that exists and then trying to understand it. Not to invent a love and try to make it exist, but to find what does exist, and then to see what it is.

The books turn out to be about things afterwards. I don't go into them with concepts, for the most part.

I begin with an image of some sort, just as if you saw something out of a window, and then went to the window to see what it was.

One can't say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards. I suppose if you a playing go or shogi, then such a thing might be helpful, but that is not life.