He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.

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.

Living honestly is a prerequisite for a clear conscience.

Though it doesn’t feel like it, crisis places us front and center of desire, which is the force of power.

World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.

Porches are America's lost rooms.

Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.

The thing that made me turn more towards writing was realizing how hard it was going to be to get a singular vision on film and how much more control I would have if I were writing novels.

But, as my mother used to tell me, two wrongs don't make a right. But I soon figured out that three left turns do.

A rib... loaves and fish... some spit... God can do a lot with a little.

My mother. She's 65 now and she has immaculate style. And that's exactly what I want to be.

Shalvis makes me laugh, makes me cry, makes me sigh with pure pleasure.