“There was no plot... and I discovered it by mistake.”

“I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.”

“The real hero is always a hero by mistake.”

“Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.”

“The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.”

“True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.”

“I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).”