“Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.”

“I like to have a secret love affair, a hidden life, something to lie about.”

“He said, ‘Oh god, help her. Damn me, I deserve it, but let her live forever.’ This was the love he should have felt for every soul in the world: all the fear and the wish to save concentrated unjustly on the one child. He began to weep.... He thought: This is what I should feel all the time for everyone.”

“All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow.”

“The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.”

“It didn't matter anyway...he wasn't made for peace, he couldn't believe in it. Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.”

“There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.”