The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.

Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

I have failed at many things, but I have never been afraid.

A desert is a place without expectation.

Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.

Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more-absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.