We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.

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.

I never would have thought of that word, "hospitality." I settle into the rhythm of my steps.

I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I've never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it.

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.

I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.

You can look at my autobiographical pieces as source books... But, you see, my fiction doesn't revolve around autobiographical questions.