I'm generous. I give good tips. It's just - the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don't want anything. I'm not a consumer. I don't crave objects.

If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics

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

I was extremely shy. And I simply didn't know how to go about it. It seemed a lot easier to write than to make films. All I needed was a pencil and a piece of paper, whereas filmmaking was something I had no access to.

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

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

I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.