Writing is always a voyage of discovery.

Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.

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

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.

A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.

Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.

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.