Writing is, after all, a gesture towards other people, giving something to others. And so it's not a completely hermetic exercise. It's really an opening up.

I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.

Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engaged in a great piece of literature, once you enter the rhythms of the language, which is a kind of music, meanings are being conveyed that you're not fully aware of. They enter into your subconscious.

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

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.