But what do I have? The things I'm told and the things I tell, that's all. And as far as I know, that never yet made anyone fly.

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

A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.

This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who learned to read at the age of 5. This changed his life. Owing to the adventure tales he read, he discovered a way to escape from the poor house, the poor country, and the poor reality in which he lived.

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

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