Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.
I don’t want to use quotation marks anymore, I’ve gone back and forth with them. In Ghosts, I didn’t use them, for instance, all the way back in the early eighties.
We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.
Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man.
As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out.
Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.
In my later novels, I systematically used the convention, and then a moment came – when did it come? With The Book of Illusions, maybe – I thought, I don’t need them anymore, I don’t need them, I want to integrate the dialogue into the text.
All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I’m inventing characters, even though it’s fiction, even though it’s make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself.
I’ve found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience – both physical and mental – and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I’m doing.
I think human beings wouldn’t be human without narrative fiction.
Some people are great, and they approach each work with honesty, and that’s wonderful. But when people have built up a sort of resentment or animosity for reasons that are hard to put your finger on, they read in bad faith.
There are two kinds of typical days. There’s the typical day when I’m writing a novel, and there’s the typical day when I’m not.
Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.
I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.
I’m not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. I confess I don’t even have a computer, I don’t have a cell phone.
For one reason or another, I became a passionate reader when I was very little. As soon as I could read, I wanted to read.
The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.
I never would have thought of that word, “hospitality.” I settle into the rhythm of my steps.
I wrote Report from the Interior was that after I finished Winter Journal, I took a pause, and I realized there was more I wanted to say.
I was extremely shy. And I simply didn’t know how to go about it. It seemed a lot easier to write than to make films. All I needed was a pencil and a piece of paper, whereas filmmaking was something I had no access to.