Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.

In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.

I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.