I’ve learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.

No es que escribir me produzca un gran placer, pero es mucho peor si no lo hago.

A lot of film people are like that– especially the ones below the line, the blue-collar guys, the grunts. They like putting their hands on the equipment and getting it to do things for them....

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn’t know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that I can pay the rent, I’m worrying about people I...

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today:...

The grinding search for money can crush the spirit out of you unless you’re made of steel.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things,...

I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film,...

una vida rota por el exceso y la escasez de este mundo

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A...

People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.

I took a job with the U.S. Census Bureau. In The Locked Room, the third volume of the New York Trilogy, there’s a sequence where the narrator talks about working for the census, and I...

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in...

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way,...

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if...

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money,...

That’s how it is with want. As long as you lack something you yearn for it without cease. if only I could have that one thing, you tell yourself, all my problems would be solved....

It was. It will never be again. Remember.

All through my writing life, I’ve had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

Each book I’ve done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed...

La vida nos arrastra de muchas maneras que no podemos controlar y casi nada permanece con nosotros.

And that’s why books are never going to die. It’s impossible. It’s the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book...

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we’re not. We are ruled by...

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those...

Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can’t really measure degrees of difficulty.

I don’t judge these things by numbers. How many people read ‘Paradise Lost’ when it was published? Two hundred? Three? As long as there’s one reader, the book is doing what a book does. Books...

[T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading...

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.

You have to protect it too, you can’t let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don’t believe in being so rigid about controlling what...

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my...

There it was: a full confession. Sherlock Holmes had done it again, and as I marveled at my devastating powers of deduction, I wished there had been two of me so I could have patted...

I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author.

I think it’s a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important....

Toda vida es inexplicable. Por muchos hechos que se cuenten, por muchos datos que se muestren, lo esencial se resiste a ser contado.

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.