If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Like all former thinkers, I'm writing a book.

Was it always my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times, until any success became an accident and failure seemed the only truth?

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

Nobody knows what you want except you, and no one will be as sorry as you if you don't get it.

I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.