Don't be timid. You're a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present.

The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.

I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.

I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.

I don't have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring.

In order not to cut out a large part of one's private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.

I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic - if we can call it that - between high and low. Maybe it's because I was not born or brought up in affluence.

Through the waters spilled by the spring, I was remade. Forth I fared, a new plant with new leaves in a new time. The stars were there, and I was set to climb.

I have great respect for the semicolon it is a mighty handy little fellow.

Anger has a way of seeping into every other emotion and planting itself in there.

If I were thinking straight, I'd take you home right now.

My favorite thing about New York is the people, because I think they’re misunderstood. I don’t think people realize how kind New York people are.

Granted, I could go out and lose everything (by) gambling and drinking, but there's no sense in denying it. It's in my blood.

Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.

You look a certain way because you want people to listen to you in a certain way.

A bad man becomes worse when he apes a saint.