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

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.

I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness.

Men do not live by truth alone; they also need lies: those that they invent freely, not those that are imposed on them; those that appear as they are, not smuggled in beneath the clothes of history. Fiction enriches their existence, completes them and, fleetingly, compensates them for this tragic condition which is our lot: always to desire and dream more than we can actually achieve.

North American society could not have reached its state of high development and modernity had it not been an open society.

Death isn't enough. It doesn't remove the stain. But a slap, a whiplash, square on the face, does. Because a man's face is as sacred as his mother or his wife.

In general, I think my freedom of invention is not limited when I use historical characters.