Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

I write to try to understand, and because I have nothing better to do.

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.

Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet.

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. At four o'clock in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered over French lands, he got up from his pallet and left for the fields, taking to pasture the half-dozen pigs whose fertility nourished him and his wife...

I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.