As with a wound on one's own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things

When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.

Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it's a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.

I want my words to survive translation.

You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.

I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I’m having this one.

The problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.

After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?

She always wanted to believe in things.

Your life must now run the course that's been set for it.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

The evening's the best part of the day. You've done your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.