“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".”

“When you say I love you very much, and your asthma's attack occurs, there is no time for palaver because instead of very you have to say call the ambulance.”

“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.”

“A word is a lot.”

“He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That’s right — something out of something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But something out of something means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that’s never happened before.”

“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.”

“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.”