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

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

The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.

I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.

What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.

I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.

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.