My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

It isn't that there's no right and wrong here. There's no right.

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

I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn't made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn't have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do.

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.