Journalism has been very important for me - for a long time I made my living as a journalist, and it also serves as a source of ideas. Many of the things I have written I would not have written without the experience of being a journalist.

Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.

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.

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.

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 writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life.