“I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one...”

“I watched the shadow of our plane hastening below us across hedges and fences, rows of poplars and canals Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying ove...”

“I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow.”

“The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said De Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and c...”

“At the time I could no more believe my eyes than I can now trust my memory.”

“Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life.”

“to love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be the one destroyed.”

“If you want to know what God thinks about any situation in the world, think like a parent.”

“If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.”

“Nature is crooked. I wanted right angles and straight lines. Ice! Oh, why do they all drip? You cut yourself opening a can of tuna fish and you die. One puncture in your foot and your life leaks ou...”

“The tattoo is there not because I believe there is something wrong with me. It's there to remind me that our flaws are our strengths”

“But maybe that isn't possible. Maybe the mind of the majority is always the healthy mind, simply by virtue of its numbers. Maybe it's the definition of madness to believe I'm right and everyone els...”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”