But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begu….

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?.

Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences..

I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose….

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction..

In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someon….

Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wr….

Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people..

The gods, the immortals, were the inventors of death and corruption; yet with one or two notable exceptions they have lacked the courage to try their….

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us..

I am not the we of anyone.

In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other..

As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies,as a form of abstract thought. I dont wish….

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful work….

I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African..

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of pas….

Temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy….

The spark of true poetry flashes when ideas are juxtaposed that no one has yet thought of bringing together..

Yet what happened in fact? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look of peace on my face, even of b….

My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the ….

To me, a philosopher who says that the distinction between human and nonhuman depends on whether you have a white or a black skin, and a philosopher ….