“Rabbits are played. Nowadays it's all about the turtles. Tell them it's a ninja, they'll freak.”

“Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.”

“I think she cried at my funeral. It's not that I'm conceited or anything, but I'm pretty sure. Sometimes I can actually picture her talking about me to some guy she feels close to. Talking about me dying. About how they lowered me into the grave, kind of shrivelled up and pitiful, like an old chocolate bar. About how we never really got a chance. And afterwards the guy fucks her, a fuck that's all about making her feel better.”

“It's amazing how people can sound like retards when they're talking to their girlfriend, especially if they really love her a lot. Because when you're just fucking someone you make a point of keeping your cool, but when you're really in love - it can sound pretty repulsive.”

“When you're having an asthma attack, you don't have any breath. When you don't have any breath, it's hard to speak. You're limited by the amount of air you can spend from your lungs. That's not much, something between three to six words. It gives the word a meaning. You're searching through the piles of words in your head, picking the most important ones. And they have a cost. It's not like the healthy people that take out every word that has accumulated in their head like garbage. When someone, while having an asthma attack, says "I love you" or "I really love you", there's a difference. A word difference. And a word is a lot, because that word could have been "sit", "Ventolin" or even "ambulance".”

“To what extent does anybody control his destiny? Life is very much like falling of the edge of a cliff. You have complete freedom to make all the choices you want to take on your way down. My characters choose to yearn and not lose hope even when the odds are completely against them. It doesn't make the landing at the end of that fall any less painful but, somehow, it helps them keep a little dignity their bone broken body.”

“She said I should pick the hall and the date and whatever I want, because it really doesn’t matter to her. That isn’t the point at all. Neither is that Dutch guy — I have nothing to be jealous of there. He’s probably dead already from an overdose or else he’s lying drunk on some sidewalk in Amsterdam, or he went and got a master’s degree in something, which sounds even worse. In any case, it’s not about him at all, it’s that time in Mombasa. For three months, a person sits and looks at you, imagining a kiss.”