When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.

I am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been.

Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time.

Liking is probably the best form of ownership, and ownership the worst form of liking.

Ah, in every age there is always some new wonder to astound mankind until they grow accustomed to it and lose interest.

The virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.

Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet.