Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.

To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

The tone of every book is slightly different; there's a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.

Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.