Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

Prosperity or egalitarianism -- you have to choose. I favor freedom -- you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.

Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella." (spoken by character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa)

The secret to a masterpiece is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.

You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.

Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

It takes darkness to be aware of the light.

One of the fears of having too much work is not having time to observe. And once you get recognised, there is nowhere for you to look any more. You can't sit on a night bus and watch it all happen.

A heaven on earth.

Happiness is just another of the tricks that our genetic system plays on us to carry out its only role, which is the survival of the species.

But peace, too, is a living thing and like all life it must wax and wane, accommodate, withstand trials, and undergo changes.

I used to think hard work made me come alive, honestly. I used to have a daily work schedule with millions of things on it and I thought, "This is wonderful!"

A person of genius should marry a person of character.

Falsehood, like the dry-rot, flourishes the more in proportion as air and light are excluded.

Let me therefore live as if every moment were to be my last.

I have a range, and I'd much rather do things the nice way than the hard way, but sometimes you have to use all the tools at your disposal.