“All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.”

I’ve never abandoned the novel.

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.

We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it’s complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he’s able to keep processing that as well.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn’t fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will – with luck – come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing – which is never an easy thing to do.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

The intricate engraving, fine lines, beading and milgrain accents echo an era defined by elaborate embellishments.

Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.

Greatness, it’s all in the details.

I’m very into details, so I watch movies just for the details.

Devil is in the details.

When people ask about us now I say we are strangers but not the kind you may think we just happen to be strangers who know every mundane detail about each other.

You breathe, you love, you feel – and that’s enough to learn to see beauty in details. Is it not an art of living to create happiness where it does not exist?

Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.