“Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own…Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.”

Most people have learned to live in the moment.

I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.

I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.

While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.

Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.

A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door’s shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.

The loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey afar from his lover, will never place himself in danger of self-sacrifice.

And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can’t really depend upon what you’ve done with previous books.

When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.

Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves.

Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.

And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go.

I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.

We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.

it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is.

Nature does not make leaps.

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

I’m not running, I’m not planning on running, and I’ve got nothing new on that story.

When any calamity is suffered, the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

The moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable…that what we take for granted may not be here for our children

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.