Tobacco is the opiate of the gentleman, the religion of the rich.

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.

I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.

Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread

When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity

No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.