I have always kept ducks, even as a child, and the colours of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind.

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.

If you agree that the person you were few years ago will take advice from the person you are now, you have made a clear progress in life.

I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important.

I read that heavy drinking is bad for your health. I decided I better stop reading.

He slips . . . but manages to regroup himself.

It's awfully easy to be in love in jail

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.

The hero is strangely akin to those who die young.

I have played with some great players during my time at United but I would have to put Paul Scholes down as the best.

And one game, as we know, can cost you a lot.