I try to outline. I'm a lazy outliner. I will put the points down of each chapter or series of chapters, but it always changes. For me it's a place of evolution. I don't really know who the characters are. I don't really know what the story is. I outline and that really just gets me moving. It's like I'm drawing up fake maps, but they turn out to be correct.

I didn't think anyone who had to demand respect ever got it.

I enjoy being influenced by other writers.

There's this quote by a writer, Emil Cioran, he's a Romanian writer. He says that you should only put things in books that you would never dare to say to people in real life. So there is that feeling of acute embarrassment, or that you've been too revealing. I think it's some kind of survival mechanism where I never think of the reader, ever. Because then I would start censoring myself.

He pointed the gun at me. Then he looked up at my hand & tilted his head slightly. - Journey, he said. I had forgotten I was still holding the book. - Céline, I said back in a whisper. - I love that book. - I'm only halfway through. - Have you got to the point where -- - Hey, kill me, but don't tell me the end!

The game is an analogy for life: there are not enough chairs or good times to go around, not enough food, not enough joy, nor beds nor jobs nor laughs nor friends nor smiles nor money nor clean air to breathe...and yet the music goes on.

You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated.