My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

Everything has changed and nothing is changed.

Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.

The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.