The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of the writer.

All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout-nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be controlled and initiated by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I'll remain a member of the loyal opposition.

Where there's life, death is inevitable. Dying's easy; it's living that's hard. The harder it gets, the stronger the will to live. And the greater the fear of death, the greater the struggle to keep on living.

For a country boy, poor as I was, whose constant worry was to be able to have enough to eat, the Army guaranteed one's survival.

A writer should always bravely face life, risking death and mutilation in order to dethrone an emperor.

I think writers write for their consciences, they write for their own true audiences, for their souls.

A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression.