Life is fundamentally up for grabs

The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism.

My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.

Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.

Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature, and my love of film...

I'm not a sociologist, and the novel has often concerned itself with sociology. It's one of the generating forces that's made fiction interesting to people. But that's not my concern. I'm interested in psychology. And also certain philosophical questions about the world.

It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.