The Uruguayans have a sort of purity. I don't know where they got it, and I doubt even if they know from where they got it. Perhaps they didn't kill off their major population.

Writers spend too much time among dead things. I thought that was profound and actually true, that you're trying to pump life into something that is inanimate. You see what a sort of audacious thing it is to move these sort of imaginary people around in a very stylized and patterned world.

All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.

I don't think I'd like Manhattan anymore. My mother-in-law lives there, and you go there. But I like looking at it from a distance. It's a fantastic sight - every time, it awes me.

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.