I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

The more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn't matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.

The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.

You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. when you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.

We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded.

When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.