She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
I don’t have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we’re having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.
Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.
She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.
Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you’ve made for yourself.
As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.
What do you do when you’re no longer the hero of your own story?
I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.
A writer should always feel like he’s in over his head.
She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.
She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.
Her cake is a failure, but she is loved anyway. She is loved, she thinks, in more or less the way the gifts will be appreciated: because they have been given with good intentions, because they exist, because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets.
What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.
This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write.
If you’ve really loved a book, or a movie for that matter, really loved it, what you want is that same book again, but as if you’ve never read it. And when you get something unfamiliar, you feel betrayed.
A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if hes any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world.
I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I’ve learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.
Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear.