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It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.

There is something sublime about its aloofness from and its indifference to its external environment.

I always love novels that open up a subject to me - like raising a window to a beautiful, mysterious world outside.

The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics.

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.

Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.

I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.

The play is a marvelous form, but it demands less than a novel.

I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I've never heard of before.