I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.

As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it.

I have a longing for fiction - to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.

For me, personally, it is very important that the days are exactly the same, so I have routines. I do the same thing every day.

Saying what you believe others want to hear is, of course, a form of lying.

The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.

Shame tells you when you've gone too far. Then you try if it's okay to go too far. And it might be so that shame was right. You can never, never know that.

As a person, I'm polite - I want to please.

If you are disappearing from yourself, but you're still writing, then there is a kind of activity of thinking going on, which in my world is similar to what's going on in music.

He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society.

Here lies the body of Colonel Cornell’s. The rest of the fellow, I fancy, in hell is.

France is revolutionary or she is nothing at all. The revolution of1789 is her political religion.

I do think music sounds better when it's on tape and more simply recorded.

I will not say nothing. I will defend my church and my religion when it is insulted and spit on.

I grew up on a dirt road with brothers.

We've been sold a concept of joy through advertising. It was somehow sold to us through a Gucci bag or something.

Now with tabloids and seeing people walking around in sweats pumping gas you're like, 'Okay, they're just like us.'

If things are going well, if the writing's coming along, I jump out of bed happy. And if the previous day has been bad, I get out of bed disgruntled.

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me