A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.

It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.

We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment

I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow.

We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.

We all have appointments with the past.

I believe that the black-and-white photograph, or rather the gray zones in the black-and-white photograph, stand for this territory that is located between life and death.

At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.

Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.

I always knew death of this relation would be the death of my life.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

But picketing - picketing for or against something, and handing out literature - these are conspicuously formal actions. They have to be understood as indirect communication.

Social media is reducing social barriers. It connects people on the strength of human values, not identities.

[Jack Johnson] really helped me make the record, put it out, and then let me tour with him for two years. He really helped me out.

Once you've been in a mental institution, people are going to look at you funny.

We are all afforded our physical existence so we can learn about ourselves.

I don't listen to music, actually. Obviously I go to clubs; I stand in elevators; a lot of my friends are musicians; I hear music all the time. But I don't have my own collection of music.

When you discover the wonder of giving, you will wonder how you could have lived so long in any other way.

I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings. And I did it out of spite.