“People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the ...”

“...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it...”

“We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.”

“We do tend to believe things while we're hearing or reading them. Afterwards, it's another matter, when the book is closed and the voice stops speaking.”

“Fiction has the ability to show us what we dont know and what doesnt happen.”

“When you dont know what to believe, when youre not prepared to play the amateur detective, then you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands o...”

“And once you've been to this Center, this Truth, you'll know your way everywhere. You are never lost again.”

“The Queen's Pride was his ship, and he loved her. (That was the way his sentences always went: It is raining today and I love you. My cold is better and I love you. Say hello to Horse and I love yo...”

“What Joab did not and could not know was that it was ego, and the ego of a king is just like the ego of anyone else. It is a social infection, entering each person as a psychological virus that is ...”

“Above all, readers want useful information, whether from a road sign or an investment guide. This motive is not completely absent even in readers of fiction, although few people read Madame Bovary ...”

“Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story w...”

“In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.”

“He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.”

“Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Sh...”

“Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.”