I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.

If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had ever heard of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz? He is not politically involved. Octavio Paz is a great poet, also not politically involved. The Nobel Prize is for literature, for the quality of work over the years.

A truly living human being cannot remain neutral.

I never talk about what I'm writing about currently, never. It's private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.

It's absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It's a betrayal of whatever talent you have.

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.

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