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.

It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.

I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I'm not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.

It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.

My wife is my first reader, my first line of defence I suppose. So she says, "Oh well, oh yes, it's all true." At the same time, I could have written much more about us, but I didn't want to go any further. I did cut things out. There are certain things that I wrote about her that are so gushing with praise and admiration that when I looked at those passages I realised they would be ridiculous to anybody else.

The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.

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