All fiction is lies – if it weren’t, it would be biography, history, or reportage.

If I had parallel lives to pursue, I would also want one as a painter.

As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.

I've always been interested in the relationship between total external surround, culture, the political matrix, technology, etc., and the internal human consciousness.

Mexico was conquered more by manipulation of myth and archetype.

I'm not gifted, but I'm not hopeless.

I get work because I'm primarily a novelist but I've become script doctor. I can work back and forth between French and English.

In America, if you don't do a 100 million dollars, you've done nothing.

Chaos is the enemy of Order but the enemy of Chaos is also the enemy of Order

If it's not American, the French won't go see it.

The world has become more complex as technology and easy travel mixes cultures without homogenizing them.

Every woman needs a man.

How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.

I didn't come from a wealthy family. My dad told us if we wanted spending money, we had to earn it. So I developed an early work ethic.

All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.

I think for a lot of so-called post-colonial peoples, there's a feeling of not being quite legitimate, of not being pure enough.

Love is not a matter of what happens in life. It's a matter of what's happening in your heart.

No other acoustic instrument can match the piano's expressive range, and no electric instrument can match its mystery.

The neurotic usually obeys his own Golden Rule: Hate thy neighbor as thyself.

Money does not sate Avarice, but stimulates it.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.