In the end, we forget the details of our lives that embarrass us or are too painful. We just lie back and allow ourselves to float along calmly over the deep waters, with our eyes closed.

Someone had told him one day that you forget the voices of those whom you have been close to in the past very quickly.

Certainly they (the Japanese) are working hard to clean it up because it's been a great embarrassment.

At the beginning, I experienced writing as a sort of constraint. Starting so young as a writer is pitiable: it's beyond your powers; you have to lay bare things that are very heavy, and you don't have the means for that.

One has to retire eventually, Guy.

I write in the most classical French because this form is necessary for my novels: to translate the murky, floating, unsettling atmosphere I wanted them to have, I had to discipline it into the clearest, most traditional language possible.