Occupation: Author Birth: February 3, 1947
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….
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..
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….
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….
There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not..
We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others..
One should never underestimate the power of books..
It's an ethical pact I've made with myself and with the reader - not to invent. And when I can't remember, I say I can't remember. I'm just appalled ….
Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out..
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….
If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics.
And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common hum….