Once you finish a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. You're giving it to other people. If something in what a writer writes can excite the imagi….

As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true..

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are….

To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body..

Art is not politics. The glory of the novel is that in its essence, it is a democratic form, because it treats individuals as worthy of scrutiny. Tha….

What if I had been born during a war and I lived in an occupied city, and people were being taken out and shot every day? Everything would be differe….

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared..

Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another,….

The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine..

The only person I knew how to be with now was myself - but I wasn´t really anyone, and I wasn´t really alive. I was just someone who pretended to be ….

As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself….

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years..

I wanted to do something different. Therefore, the first person I thought would have been too exclusionary. It would have said me, me, me, me, me. I,….

I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her bod….

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if n….

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life become….

He knew that his wings could ignite at any moment, but the closer he came to touching the fire, the more he sensed that he was fulfilling his destiny….

Often it's true that films just go right through us. You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it's not a great film, it loses its power ver….

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three day….

I've been asked several times over the years to become president, and I've always said no, because I didn't want to give up all the time from my work….

Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a youn….