One thing I knew about the novelist’s task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death.

To rehearse imaginary conversations on paper is called literature. To do so out loud is called madness.

The future can always wait so long as the here-and-now is rapturous.

I wanted her body and soul, but body first.

One thing I knew about the novelist’s task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death.

I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.

The railway was part scalpel, part movie camera, slicing the city open, parading its inner workings at fifty frames per second. It was on the S-Bahn that she felt least abandoned, as if the act of travelling turned back the clock, and brought her nearer to the future she had lost.