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

I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.

you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you

Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.

I've been very lucky in this second marriage. It's just luck. It's absolute luck. And I can only marvel at it. So many other things could have happened that didn't, so overall I feel blessed.

Late style gets simpler and shorter, and here, I'm getting more abundant as I get older!

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.