Occupation: Author Birth: February 3, 1947
The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine..
When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story ….
Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us e….
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….
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 think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books..
You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you..
For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that hou….
There is a double rhythm in all human beings. We are binary beings - two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears. Two legs for walking. And the heartbeat ….
Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years..
it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contempora….
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….
My wife is my first reader, my first line of defence I suppose. So she says, "Oh well, oh yes, it's all true." At the same time, I could have written….
I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months..
I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy….
As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true..
Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it..
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 believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art..
Reason and memory are nearly always at odds..
Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another,….