When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life.

There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.

Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed. There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules.

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.

Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.