Reading gave me great comfort and pleasure. When I started being able to write, around seven or eight, I wanted to be able to do that myself, to create that other world.

Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.

Boring people don't know they're boring. That's the problem with boring people.

I'm trying always to leave out what I think is extraneous. And to find what I think is the most wonderful language to make a beautiful sentence.

I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.

I'm the author of my own misery.

I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.

It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.

Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.

Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.

Without curiosity a writer is dead.

The void inside me starts to fill, but my heart has holes, and whatever it holds will run out, leaving me empty once again.

Koekebakker, I feel so strange inside.' 'Well you certainly smell like jenever, ' I said. 'No, ' Japi said, ' it's not the jenever. I think my soul is too big.

Painting dissolves the forms at its command ... it melts them into color.

I have lovely memories of Los Angeles in the 1930s. I came down to live with my mother's cousin and they invited me to come and go to junior college for a year.

I was very keen on playing a victim.

If you can't sell your product, it's not a product-it's a hobby.

When you fully commit, you will make it.

My dad is a good dad.

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.