The funny thing is, as a young person I was trying to write prose, and I wrote a lot of it, but I was never satisfied with the results. Two of the novels I wound...

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

I’ve always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil – especially for corrections.

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We’ve kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don’t need. I’m anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of...

Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.

it’s a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes–all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom

I couldn’t imagine myself doing it anymore. It was part of my life that had ended for me, and here was my chance to set out on a fresh course

You can’t put your feet on the ground until you’ve touched the sky.

I’m not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me.

And I am nothing if not a stupid, stupid man.

failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding...

If you’re not ready for everything, you’re not ready for anything.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.

The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives.