It's good fun to create an unpredictable character. When he comes into the room, I don't know what he's going to do - I have to find my way.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

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.

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.

So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.

He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.