It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.

We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.