You can say that literature is about topics like love, death, and all that, but I think there is only one topic that applies to all literature and that is belonging.

To read is to cover one's face. And to write is to show it.

If you write, and you are really alone (writing is a lonely thing), you learn to be alone without suffering. When you read, you also learn to do this. When you write, you deal with things.

I was going to be a memory when I grew up.

I knew little, but at least I knew that: no one could speak for someone else. That although we might want to tell other people's stories, we always end up telling our own.

I am still trying to find out things. And I inevitably tell myself the story in different ways every time I think about it.

You're looking for something, I don't know what I'm looking for, but I'm looking. Writing is a lot about that. When you write a poem. When you write a novel.

Everything has been said and everything has been done, but you still feel like you are looking for something.

For me, writing is a way of finding out about things I didn't know before I began writing.

When you read a novel, you know what to expect because you've been reading novels for a long time.

You are told that you have to eliminate un-useful sentences, but as a writer you know how important details are.

Do what others do not do, Believe in what others do not believe, Feel what others cant feel, Become what others cannot be

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

I've always found that the best travelers are the very same people who are intensely interested in the history and culture of their own home city.

I've chosen jobs that were sexy because I wanted to do them.

That global poverty would end. That people would be able to eat. It's the worst shame in the world that people go hungry.

I think that Van Gogh is really the ultimate crazy artist that we all think of.

There's a desire in me to express something - to match what I hear in my head.

Human experience is usually paradoxical.

Every single work of art is the fulfillment of a prophecy; for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image.

Some of us were born to hate and some of us were born to be great.