I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.
I am your handiwork made flesh. You took beauty and created hideousness, and out of this monstrosity your child will be born …. I am the meaning of your deeds. I am the meaning of your so-called love;...
He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.
He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence, that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in the brightness with which she faced the wor...
He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.
Happy birthday, Nicaragua. I drank a toast in the best rum in the world, Flor de Caña Extra Seco. Mixed with Coke, it was called a Nica-libre, and after a few glasses I was ready to take on the salsa...
Genius was being born in her, filling the empty spaces in her bed, her heart, her womb. She needed no-one but herself.
Faced with the blazing magnificence of the everyday, the artist is both humbled and provoked. There are photographs now of events on an unimaginable scale [...] When we look at these images, there is,...
Atata timp cat esti anesteziat si nu iti simti tragedia propriei vieti, poti supravietui. Cand iti revine limpezimea, cand iti este meticulos redata, te poate innebuni. memoria retrezita la viata te p...
Any story worth its salt can handle a little shaking up.
A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madnes...
The true direction of her heart: that is to say, inwards, to the reality of dreams.
I do have a lot of time for people in my life, and friendship is a very important subject for me. I think I'm unusual among the writers I know in that respect.
The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian socie...
Perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.
Everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale;
You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.
Who hopes for an hour hopes for eternity. The world in an hour. What follows is unseen.
When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, it was an accident, but when she stepped through the looking glass, it was of her own free will, and a braver deed by far.
What's a „culture? Look it up. „A group of micro-organisms grown in a nutrient substance under controlled conditions. A squirm of germs on a glass slide is all, a laboratory experiment calling itself...