I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

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

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.

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.

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

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty.