I can’t understand nothingness. I can’t understand it and I can’t imagine it.
I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.
Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.
I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else.
Life might just be an absurd, even crude, chain of events and nothing more.
There’s an essential order you have to follow in everything. It’s a way of showing respect, following everything in the correct order.
Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.
The good thing about writing book is that you can dream while you are awake...
If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I’d never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit.
I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life.
Writing talent is similar to the art of chatting up a girl. You can improve to a certain degree through practice, but basically you are either born with it or you aren’t.
The grounds of the place were dominated by several large, old willow trees that towered over the surrounding stone wall and swayed soundlessly in the wind like lost souls.
The facts and techniques or whatever they teach you in class isn’t going to be veryuseful in the real world, that’s for sure.
As long as possible, I would really like to complete one marathon per year. Though my time has been slowing down as I get older, it has become a very important part of my life.
The honour of physical decline is waiting, and you have to get used to that reality.
Everything. Things you lost. Things you’re gonna lose. Everything. Here’s where it all ties together.
I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt but I was wrong.
Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level. When I write a novel, I go into such depths.
I have no idea! I have been writing for 35 years and from the beginning up to now the situation’s almost the same. I’m kind of an ugly duckling. Always the duckling, never the swan.
What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.