“Hey, I get enough exercise; I breathe in and I breathe out.”

“Breathing my mother in,
Breathing my beloved in,
Breathing,
Breathing her nicotine,
Breathing,
Breathing the fall-out in,
Out in, out in, out in, out in.”

“Hey, you freakin' bastard," I breathed. "You hit me again and I'll take care of your family planning.”

“are you breathing, are you lucky enough
to be breathing”

“I said breathe. Not do a fish-out of-water imitation.”

“I do my job like I breathe — so if I can’t breathe I’m in trouble.”

“I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.”

“What is the real breath of a man — the breathing out or the breathing in?”

“I am breathing. In dreams, we never bother to breathe.”

“So the novel is a race, and I can see the finish line from the first sentence: it’s an intuition that magnetizes the entire text. The closer I get to the goal, the faster I want to go. There’s even a sense of urgency, of hurrying, as though I was out of breath and had to, at all costs, finish before I ran out of strength. So I find that my endings are often too quick, not unfolded enough, not majestic enough…”