Surely it is an odd way to spend your life – sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words...

Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all – most of us, anyway –...

The most challenging project I’ve ever done, I think, is every single thing I’ve ever tried to do. It’s never easy.

I find it impossible to start a project without the title in mind. I can sometimes spend years thinking of the title to go with the thing that’s forming in my head. A title defines...

Bit by bit, he has pared down his desires to what is now approaching a bare minimum. He has cut out smoking and drinking, he no longer eats in restaurants, he does not own a...

Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn’t be human without...

I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.

Movies are not novels, and that’s why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can’t be done.

Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born...

I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that...

This is what is called speaking. I believe that is the term. When words come out, fly into the air, live for a moment, and die. Strange, is it not? I myself have no opinion....

Money’s important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don’t have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life.

For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.

I woke up one day and thought: ‘I want to write a book about the history of my body.’ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body...

Las oportunidades perdidas forman parte de la vida igual que las oportunidades aprovechadas, y una historia no puede detenerse en lo que podría haber sido.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and...

I think if we didn’t contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.

When I’m writing, I don’t feel neurotic. So it’s better for the family if I’m working.

Anyway, right around that time I had a problem with a wisdom tooth and I had to go to the dentist to have the thing pulled out, and it was while I was sitting in...

Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history – which one both participates in and is a witness to,...

I’m living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

I make no excuse for what happened. Drunkenness is never more than a symptom, not an absolute cause, and I realize that it would be wrong of me to try to defend myself. Nevertheless, there...

Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us—every man, woman, and child—and with...

You’re too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

I can never say ‘why’ about anything I do. I suppose I can say ‘how’ and ‘when’ and ‘what.’ But ‘why’ is impenetrable to me.

I’m generous. I give good tips. It’s just – the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don’t want anything. I’m not a consumer. I don’t crave objects.

Your mind is on the moon, and from the looks of things, it’s nevergoing to be anywhere else. You have no ambitions, you don’t give a damn about money, and you’retoo much of a philosopher...

Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.

The human body is strange and flawed and unpredictable. The human body has many secrets, and it does not divulge them to anyone, except those who have learned to wait.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing...

You tend to feel very hurt when people attack you and feel indifferent when you get praise. You think, ‘Of course they like it. They should like it.’

In the mid-70s I wrote some plays, also, but it wasn’t until the very late ’70s when I ran into a real crisis on every level, personal, artistic, and I was absolutely broke, I’d run...

I hear her slip into bed with him, and I hear everything that happens after that. Sex is such a strange and sloppy business, why bother to recount every slurp and moan that ensued? Tom...

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

There’s hope for everyone. That’s what makes the world go round.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I...

Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.

The truth of the story lies in the details.

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you...

I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded...

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books – this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one’s life becomes very small.

It’s extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can’t get a job on a ship unless you have seaman’s paper’s, and you can’t get seaman’s papers unless you have a job on a ship....