The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.

You know, there's that silly saying 'We're born alone and we die alone' -it's nonsense. We're surrounded at birth and surrounded at death. It is in between that we're alone.

Anything that's worth anything is complicated.

Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior.

People, it turns out, aren't a product of their own time. They're a product of the time before theirs

Here is a fact: nothing in all civilization has been as productive as ludicrous ambition. Whatever its ills, nothing has created more. Cathedrals, sonatas, encyclopedias: love of God was not behind them, nor love of life. But the love of man to be worshiped by man.

We enjoy this illusion of continuity and we call it memory. Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn't the end of life, but the end of memories