It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

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.

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

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.

When I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon.

That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it.