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.

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.

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.

Nuts, arms, stomachs -- they never hurt. All hurt is brain hurt.

Not all marketing people are writers, but all writers must learn to be marketers.

Before I started a company, I was an employee with a bad attitude. I was always felt like, bosses are stupid, and people weren't well treated.

I see myself as an old man and an unqualified teacher to the nation. I think being a teacher is probably the most important thing you can be in politics.

Piano playing is a dying art. I love the fact that I can be one guy with one instrument evoking an emotional and musical experience.

Mankind is considered (by the radical environmentalists) the lowest and the meanest of all species and is blamed for everything.

Actors search for rejection. If they don't get it they reject themselves.

A wonderful bird is a pelican, His bill will hold more than his belican. He can take in his beak Food enough for a week; But I'm damned if I see how the helican.

It's just so hard to feel good, you know?" I do know. And more than that, it's just so incredibly hard to feel. (54)

If you read the life of great men and women who made important changes in history, there are two common features: One, they were angry at the state of affairs and, two, they were people of faith.