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

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

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.

I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.

Words are one of the most powerful things given to human beings. In the hands of artists who can use them properly they are like weapons of mass construction.

When you hate something for twenty years, you get to know it well.

There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser.

We often act treacherously more from weakness than from a fixed motive.

From the death of the old the new proceeds, and the life of truth from the death of creeds.

A woman never forgets the men she could have had; a man, the women he couldn't

I don't feel like a romantic lead; I guess I feel more like a character actor.

Those trees seem to grow every year.

In my heart I know what kind of person I am, and that's good enough.

The value of art is its ability to look into the "world of oblivion" and to find things that are generally unrecognized, forgotten, invisible and impossible to tell.