Most of my friends' fathers had been in the war - either as soldiers or in some other capacity in the military. Whereas my father had not fought. He was older and he was in a business that was considered essential to the wartime effort - the wire business - and, of course, I was so young I didn't understand any of this.

There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.

It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket.

We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

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

The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.

I hate reading digital books. I don't enjoy the experience. I like smelling the paper, turning the pages. I think the book as we've always known it is an efficient technology.