The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

In a sense I am able to interrogate myself, address myself from that slight distance and enter a kind of dialogical relationship with myself. Because I'm saying, "Look, these are things that have happened to me, but how odd they are or how ordinary they are [is up to the reader to decide]."

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.

We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.

The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.