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.

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.

A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.