“Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such. ”

“I want you to be everything that's you, deep at the center of your being.”“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated”

“I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuadinig arguments of my best friends.”

“I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys.”

“Your being born makes your parents God. You owe them your life, and they can control you. Then puberty makes you Satan, just because you want something better.”

“A book is finished when it does not want me to work on it any longer...it reaches a point when it feels like it is literally avoiding me. I have a very physical relationship with the manuscript, almost a corps à corps. Paradoxically, when I finally feel at ease with a manuscript, with its voices, I realize it is finished. I see a book as a living organism, with its own rules and will. What matters to me is to allow it to grow and to acquire an existence of its own. It’s as if the book uses me in order to come into existence, rather than being written.”