I always try to describe the situation just as it is. I try to find sentences that I believe tell the story best. Even my articles are more literary than ordinary news stories.

There is nothing I would change - to change it I would have had to write a totally different book.

If you've lived in a dictatorship for thirty years, you're used to people lying to you.

I was thinking, there are 5 million people, and I am just one of those 5 million. In the build-up to the war you see children playing in the street, and you think, ah, I'm going to be okay.

I will get a loan and pay the money the court asks for. But I will not lay down my writing and I still say this was an important book to write.

If I leave, reality will devour me. Then they will all really be dead.

Being a war correspondent, and having covered four wars, I know that wars very seldom solve things.