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.

I think in a country like mine, violence is at the root of all human relations.

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

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.

I don't accept the idea that literature can be just entertainment and that there is no consequences of literature in the real world.

Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.

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