I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.

People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.

Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes prematurely grey hair.

The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.

When I remember my family, I always remember their backs. They were always indignantly leaving places.