The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

...and yet I am what they think I am.

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.