I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

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.

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

I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

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.