You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.

When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.

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

In my later novels, I systematically used the convention, and then a moment came - when did it come? With The Book of Illusions, maybe - I thought, I don't need them anymore, I don't need them, I want to integrate the dialogue into the text.

and now we get to the hard part. the endings, the farewells, and the famous last words. if you don't hear from me often, remember that you're in my thoughts.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.

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.