As a child, I never wanted my parents to be unhappy, which meant that I would always contemplate what would make them happy.

I think when you write, you should call it a "writing spree." I don't write every day, and I don't write regularly.

Life is one heck of an invention. It is better than the iPhone 4S and Coke Zero combined.

When I started writing my stories, I thought that not only nobody outside my language, but nobody outside my neighbourhood would get them.

What you experience in the army, aged 18 to 21, is what you take through all your life. You cross invisible lines: you shoot someone, get shot, break into people's houses. It's naive to think you won't carry anything into your life.

You take a book, and what can you do with a book? Can you cook an egg on a book? No. Can you dig a hole? No. Is it a good weapon? No. The fact that it's good for nothing kind of makes it almost all-important.

He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That’s right — something out of something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But something out of something means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that’s never happened before.