Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.

To be human is to be in a story.

The minute you become conscious that you are doing good, that's the minute you have to stop because from then on it's wrong.

When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

A year and a half after the end of the war and the German occupation, Paris was muted and looked bruised and forlorn. Everywhere I went, I sensed the tracks of the wolf that had tried to devour the city. But Paris proved inedible, as it had been ever since its tribal beginnings on an island in the Seine, the Ile de la Cité.

You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.