I am a writer of fragments.

I left my country because I was forced to, and I do not think that I am going to lose my language because I live in England

I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.

What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other