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.

The secret to a masterpiece is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it

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.

If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.

Death isn't enough. It doesn't remove the stain. But a slap, a whiplash, square on the face, does. Because a man's face is as sacred as his mother or his wife.