Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves.

I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.

Even castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint.

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen. I just wait.

Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.

Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart.

I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do.

Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.

If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.

Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.

Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.

Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.

The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.

Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It's like my body's split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We're running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her.

Only the Dead stay seventeen forever.

Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it's time to drink.

It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones.

Money had no name of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.

There are ways of dying that don't end in funerals. Types of death you can't smell.

Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.

The light of morning decomposes everything.

Mediocrity's like a spot on a shirt—it never comes off.

To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.

A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.

Waste is the highest virtue one can achieve in advanced capitalist society.

Spring as concept raged in upon us, a somber tide of longing. Its advent roused the passions of those nameless multitudes fallen between the cracks of the city, sweeping them noiselessly toward the quicksands of futility.

Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.

The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school.

Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.

No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves.