Certainly the people who are close to me are happier. They feel freer.

Communists are the last optimists.

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.

When I was a child, we seemed to be living in a world remote from the rest of the world. But television has made a great difference to all of us. If something happens where I live, you see it tomorrow or perhaps even at the same time it is happening there. It's not "one world" in the sense that conflicts are resolved in the world. But we are more one world in that we know what is going on and are psychologically influenced by what goes on around us.

Fiction is a way of exploring possibilities present but undreamt of in the living of a single life.

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views.