I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer.

It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!

Often it's true that films just go right through us. You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it's not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.

Yes, she is in love with him, and yes, in spite of his qualms and inner hesitations, he loves her back, however improbable that might seem to him. Note here for the record that he is not someone with a special fixation on young girls. Until now, all the women in his life have been more or less his own age. Pilar therefore does not represent an embodiment of some ideal female type for him--she is merely herself, a small piece of luck he stumbled across one afternoon in a public park, an exception to every rule.

There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.