“All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.”

“We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.”

“Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all, and take the suffering on oneself.”

“Time is so fast that all times are past times! When you look at a photo of the past, you must know that you are already in the album, someone else is looking at your photo! All times are past times!”

“Once upon a time, Caleb held me captive in the dark, now he used it to seduce me.”

“I was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established that one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt, lunacy--once you have these in place, you are set to go.”