In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.

I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.

Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

Poetry is prose in slow motion.

Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.

But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It’s a mistake of emphasis.

Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

An honourable man is fair even to his enemies

When I was growing up, we were taught in school that North Koreans, and especially the North Korean leadership, were all devils.

You have to understand the teen years of any leader to understand the mechanics of their leadership.

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.

Fatherland before everything, art afterward.

The most important thing is that it's much more fun to play in a band than to be in an audience in a club. That's the main thing I think, that you can do it.

For all the claims one hears about the liberating impact of the data-net, the truth is that it's wished on most of us a brand-new reason for paranoia.

Where I come from, being a hard man is being able to take a good beating and then get back up again and carry on fighting.

There is not a minute of time in all of our life but we must either be near to God or we will be undone.

A good friend is like a wonderful book, the inside is even better than the cover!