“A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises. ”

“A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind. ”

“What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.”

“Kindness, I’ve discovered, is everything in life.”

“Life is God's novel. Let him write it.”

“When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer. ”

“Yes, I lay in my grave. But if you lie in a grave long enough, you get accustomed to it and you don't want to part from it. He had given me a pill of cyanide, He and his wife and their son also carried such pills. We all lived with death, and I want you to know that one can fall in love with death. Whoever has loved death cannot love anything else any more. When the liberation came and they told me to leave, I didn't want to go. I clung to the threshold like an ox being dragged to the slaughter. ("Hanka")”