“I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.”

“It is impossible to explain. But what I like most is to eat.”

“I soaked the conversations up like a sponge, pulled them apart, rearranged them to make their origins disappear, and when I told them to the same people who had told the stories earlier, they were bewildered by the coincidence between what I said and what they were thinking.”

“I never used to write down all the ideas that occur to me while writing. I believed if I forgot them they were not important, and the ones that really mattered were those I remembered. Now I write them all down.”

“One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.”

“The driver warned me: Be careful, scholar, they kill in that house. I replied: If it's for love it doesn't matter.”

“Trying to provoke him into a terrifying sentence, I said: The only definitive thing is death. Yes, he said, but it isn't easy to get there when one's condition is as good as yours.”