I don't like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn't work.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.

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.

What I'm trying to do [in Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions.

I guess of all those novels, Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the one I like the best. I thought there were some beautiful things in that, particularly the relationship between the man who finds the briefcase and the woman whose husband owned the briefcase. It's quite a beautiful passage.

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.