Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you

You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life

My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me—don’t make me a category before you get to know me!

I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.