Emphasis must be put on learning: there is no substitute to education. It can be briefly formulated in a few words: always, whatever you do in life, think higher and feel deeper.

Weapons means killing. Weapons is ah, I'm simply sensitive to the word.

Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them. These characters want to get out, to breathe fresh air and partake of the wine of friendship; were they to remain locked in, they would forcibly break down the walls. It is they who force the writer to tell their stories.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

Often I say to myself "Really, what are we doing on this planet?" We are passing the message as well as we can, communicating our fears, our hopes ... Day in day out, week after week and year after year, people kill each other.

We cannot indefinitely avoid depressing subject matter, particularly it it is true, and in the subsequent quarter century the world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear - the story of how a cultured people turned to genocide, and how the rest of the world, also composed of cultured people, remained silent in the face of genocide. (v)

The sky is so close to the sea that it is difficult to tell which is reflected in the other, which one needs the other, which one is dominating the other.