I write to try to understand, and because I have nothing better to do.

doubt is the privilege of those who have lived a long time

Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.

When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.

You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have

The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.

We are finally living in Plato's cave, if we consider how those who were imprisoned within the cave - who could do nothing but watch those shadows passing on the back wall - were convinced that those shadows were their one and only reality. I see a profound similarity to all this in the epoch we're now living in. We no longer live simply through images: we live through images that don't even exist, which are the result not of physical projection but of pure virtuality.