"Everything that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

"I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all the ancestors that…"

"I am not a philosopher. I am a writer of fiction."

"The only way to be happy is to be ignorant."

"I am a man of the nineteenth century, living in the twentieth."