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.

The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.

For me a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.

I was very moved to see that the name of the boat was Hamlet - an imaginary character becomes so important to people, we think about them so much that we name a ship after them. The imaginary lives on in the real.

Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man.