All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?

Kill me, or you are a murderer.

It is possible that some people are sorry for me, but I am not aware of it.

Writing, when it springs from within, is like giving birth, and the child is covered in mucus

As I lie in bed I assume the shape of a big beetle, a stag beetle or a cockchafer, I think.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family.

The Hunter has been turned into a butterfly. Do not laugh.