A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

That's the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real.

Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.

I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.

There's a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody's family. We all pretend to outsiders that it's not so but behind locked doors there are usually high emotions running.