Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can't we?

The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.

Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.

I was born just after the end of World War II, and with my friends in our little suburban backyards in New Jersey, we used to play war a lot. I don't know if boys still play war, they probably do, but we were thrusting ourselves into recent history and we were always fighting either the Nazis or the Japanese.

I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty.