If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

Writers should provoke disagreement.

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

Small things start us in new ways of thinking

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.