The worst pain ... isn't the pain you feel at the time, it's the pain you feel later on when there's nothing you can do about it, They say that time heals all wounds, But we never live long enough to test that theory.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

We're not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations.

all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.

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.

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

Such is our need to shower blame on some distant entity when it is we who lack the courage to face up to what is there before us.