Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.

When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.

I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone – its value is incontestable.

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.