I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.

I never would have thought of that word, "hospitality." I settle into the rhythm of my steps.

I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else.

"The weird world rolls on..." meaning that through all the ups and downs, all the travails that we go through, all the horrors, all the wars, all the deaths, all the cruelties, there's still something that keeps us wanting to wake up the next morning and go on with our lives - to make children, to fall in love, to continue humanity.

I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.