But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

Reading and writing are the same thing; it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other.

To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.

I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.

I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That doesn't interest me. I want everything to be essential.

I tend to think of myself as a highly emotional writer. It's all coming out of the deepest feelings, out of dreams, out of the unconscious.

I've always been passionately in love with movies, to such a degree that even as a young person of about nineteen or twenty I thought maybe I would try to become a film director. The reason I didn't do it was because I felt I didn't have the right personality. At that time in my life, I was mortally shy.