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

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

Men do not live by truth alone; they also need lies: those that they invent freely, not those that are imposed on them; those that appear as they are, not smuggled in beneath the clothes of history. Fiction enriches their existence, completes them and, fleetingly, compensates them for this tragic condition which is our lot: always to desire and dream more than we can actually achieve.

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

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

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.

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