For me, writing is a job. I do not separate the work from the act of writing like two things that have nothing to do with each other. I arrange words one after another, or one in front of another, to tell a story, to say something that I consider important or useful, or at least important or useful to me. It is nothing more than this.

I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement.

If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.

...the human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily.

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.

Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature.

I'm not pessimistic. It is the world that is terrible. How can we be optimistic in the face of a planet where people live so badly, nature is being destroyed and the dominant empire is money?