Throw yourself into the convulsions of the world. I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't believe progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it, to look at it, to witness it. Try and get it. Seize the moment.

Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.

On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it.

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

I don't know what I think until I write it down.