我
Les chères mains qui furent miennes.
Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la décadence.
Les sanglots longs / Des violons / De l’automne / Blessent mon cœur / D’une langueur / Monotone.
All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing.
There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered.
We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark.
Happiness is rarely absent; it is we that know not of its presence.
The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.
The books that we love, they love us back. And just as we mark our places in the pages, those pages leave their marks on us.
I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you—it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.
The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.
I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.
The writer’s life is a meaningless question. I’m interested in the books.
I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, ‘Is he as crazy as I am?’ I don’t need that question answered.
We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.
The stories we love best do live in us forever.
We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already.