The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be alive, a dead mean who spent his days translating a dead man´s book.

For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.

What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.

Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.

Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.