I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.

Wherever there's capitalism there's this inclination toward simplicity. There's also a human need to process complicated things by turning them into something else.

I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

I cannot stand that whole game of confession, that is: Here I have sinned, now I'm confessing my sins, and describing my path of sin and then in the act of confession I beg for your forgiveness and redemption.