We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.

It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.

We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment

I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow.

We all have appointments with the past.

I believe that the black-and-white photograph, or rather the gray zones in the black-and-white photograph, stand for this territory that is located between life and death.

At the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.

Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.

... the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion.

A good scientist must accept the challenge that one day everything he believes could be wrong.

I wasn't ecstatic about being pregnant - I wasn't somebody who actively wanted kids. Certainly there were no fantasies about nappy-changing.

Grandchildren don't stay young forever, which is good because Pop-pops have only so many horsey rides in them.

Helsinki may not be as cold as you make it out to be, but California is still a lot nicer. I don't remember the last time I couldn't walk around in shorts all day.

In New York, pretending to be above the struggle means no seat on the bus and a table next to the kitchen.

When I was 34, people would say, What's going to happen to you when you're 40? What are you going to do? You don't have much time left. And I was like, what are you talking about?

See, there's a fat guy doing okay. Bring me another beer.

The truth is, I'm drawn to all kinds of things.

Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.

You must not look in that mirror at your doughy legs and flat feet, for today is about dreams and illusions, and unfiltered natural daylight is the enemy of dreams.