I'm a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible..

I'd given up everything to be a writer, and if I didn't then go on to do that - to write - then I didn't know what would happen to me..

Sometimes I write with a particular person in mind. I think it's fair to say that I write for a perceptive reader. You have to get it. If you don't g….

It seems to me that literature is giving way a little bit to the immediacy of other diversions, other forms of entertainment. What will it be in fift….

We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives..

It's just that it's hard to believe in greatness..

In climbing, being first-rate is part of the whole enterprise. The important climbers want to be the first man up the mountain, the one who put up th….

A light snow, a snow so faint and small-bodied that it seems nothing more than a manifestation of the cold..

I don't hold myself dictated to by what everyone is saying, by the tabloids or popular opinion. I don't like bourgeois values. I say you find your ow….

When I'm filling notebooks I'm trying to pin down what I'm really interested in and to find those details that are so hard to come by, details that I….

In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural..

In general, American life is more easy-going. And civic pride, national pride in a cultural sense, is great in America. I think what they esteem in A….

But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: ….

Of them all, it was the true love. Of them all, it was the best. That other sumptuous love which made one drunk, which one longed for, envied, believ….

You would have to be very optimistic to think that any of your books will be among the books that survive in the very long run. I think if a writer i….

Amplitude is a powerful quality in fiction. It results in involvement, in sympathy with the characters. After a while, a reader can't avoid being inv….

Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult..

Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, person….

You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true..

The summer has ended. The garden withers. The mornings become chill. I am thirty, I am thirty-four -the years turn dry as leaves..

It's tremendous: this world, this life. Take it while you have it..