I think there might be some pressure released while I'm doing autobiographical work, but afterwards everything remains the same.

The truth of the story lies in the details.

To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body.

I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art.

In my later novels, I systematically used the convention, and then a moment came - when did it come? With The Book of Illusions, maybe - I thought, I don't need them anymore, I don't need them, I want to integrate the dialogue into the text.

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.

[Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a boy-writer.