But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects.

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed.

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.

Whoever reflects on four things I would be better if he were never born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, that which is after.

Translation is the art of failure.

I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way.