Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books.

What's happened at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is one of the grossest violations of human rights under the Geneva Conventions that we have record of. It is simply monstrous.

Now the masses of Latin America are electing governments they feel can take forward the democratic reforms of the last 20 years, and transform them into social and economic reforms. This is, I think, extremely important, because it also means that the left has abandoned the revolutionary solution proposed by Che Guevara and has taken the democratic path.

In the name of certainty, the greatest crimes have been committed against humanity.

The possibility of being as free with the camera as we are with the pen is a fantastic prospect for the creative life of the 21st century.

The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.

To read and write is a paradise.