A couple’s first task, it has always seemed to me, is to solve the problem of breakfast; if this can be worked out amicably, most other difficulties can too.
Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?
Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction.
Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.
I’m a novelist, so I can’t write about ideas unless they’re attached to people.
It’s easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren’t writers, and very little harm comes to them.
Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.
History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.
Why should anything happen when everything has happened?
Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well enough alone? Why aren’t the books enough?
When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don’t have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.
History isn’t what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
I dreamt that I woke up. It’s the oldest dream of all, and I’ve just had it.
If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that’s what caused me to be like this, it’s not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.
Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.