In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.

The secret to a masterpiece is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.

Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty.

That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it.

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.