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.

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.