He slipped away slowly, withdrawing from this world by small, imperceptible degrees, and in the end it was as if he were a drop of water evaporating in the sun, shrinking and shrinking until at last he wasn’t there anymore.
You tend to feel very hurt when people attack you and feel indifferent when you get praise. You think, ‘Of course they like it. They should like it.’
People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you’re going to see just about all that you can handle.
Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.
We’re outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we’re there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.
Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.
When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.
Money is the driving force of Hand to Mouth, the lack of money, and all those true stories about strange things in The Red Notebook, coincidences and unlikely events, surprise, the unexpected.
Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people – more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true – in certain rare, isolated cases.
Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.
Money, of course, is never just money. It’s always something else, and it’s always something more, and it always has the last word.
In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.
How can you think about the world without factoring in the unforseen, the fluke event?
It became a habit of mine never to leave the house without a pencil in my pocket.
Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.
Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn’t waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.
But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.
For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.
For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.