Very often we support change, and then are swept away by the change. I think that...you just make your own response to your own generation. A response adequate to your time.

Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

From Ernest Hemingway's stories I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

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.

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.