You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.

There are people with a lot of prejudice, a lot of fear of the unknown. They think that immigration is a danger, when really it is a solution. This is an interesting issue, because it will be a central question of our time.

We were trained as writers with the idea that literature is something that can change reality, that it's not just a very sophisticated entertainment, but a way to act.

Prosperity or egalitarianism -- you have to choose. I favor freedom -- you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

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

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

Even though what I enjoy most is literature, I would not want to live only in a world of fiction, cut off from the rest of life. No - I want to always have a foot in the street, to be inmersed in the activities of my contemporaries, in the times, in the place where I live.