Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning..

The past beats inside me like a second heart..

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there..

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence..

Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The ….

With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family..

A plot begins when somebody has something to hide..

What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it..

All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's….

I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality ….

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there..

A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him..

I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche i….

We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past..

There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mi….

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first….

Poetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily ….

Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet..

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and app….

Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it..

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them..