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

I've been asked several times over the years to become president, and I've always said no, because I didn't want to give up all the time from my work. The position won't be open for another year, but if they still want me then, I'll do it; I'll speak out as often as I can from that platform.

What I'm trying to do [in Winter Journal] is to tell the story of a man's life from birth, but there are different versions of him, four different versions.

In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.

I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.