“Anyone longing to become a writer, for even a few moments of his life, will vainly weave fantastic events unless he has experienced that fall during which he doesn’t know where or whether it will come to an end, and unless his longing for human contact awakens in him the strength to rise, purged, from the ashes.”

“Man is afraid to attain what he longs for, just as subconsciously he longs for what he is afraid of.”

“The halcyon days of childhood, a time when everything lay open before him, when the most minor episodes could be construed as events and every chance encounter … gave rise to fresh insights.”

“I realised the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying.”

“...there is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love.”

“..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.”

“It needs a lot of courage to admit to an action that one is ashamed of and knows to be wrong. One's reluctance to hurt someone else is just an excuse; in fact it is lack of courage.”