People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.

It's one thing to say, 'I don't like what you said to me and I find it rude and offensive,' but the moment you threaten violence in return, you've taken it to another level, where you lose whatever credibility you had.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second, or one sixteenth, or one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth. Snap your fingers; a snapshot's faster.

The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.