The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be subsidized by the state. It leads to an intellectual and artistic castration.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

Literature is a form of permanent insurrection. Its mission is to arouse, to disturb, to alarm, to keep men in a constant state of dissatisfaction with themselves.

writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.