The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?

I didn't become a writer to write about me.

The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.

I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.