What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.

Love isn't about when you first meet. It's about the many, many years you spend together, when you're trying to keep that flame burning.

As with a wound on one's own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things

Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator's memories and thoughts.

I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.

I want my words to survive translation.

One need hardly dwell on the catastrophic possibility of uttering a bantering remark only to discover it wholly inappropriate