The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea.

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.

History is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error.

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.

I felt like poisoning a monk.

Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.