Sadness is very close to hate.

You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.

There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.

Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.

What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language.

So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.

When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.