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

The facts are always less than what really happened.

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

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.

Nothing fades so quickly as what is unchanged.

Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.

The process of writing fiction is totally unconscious. It comes from what you are learning, as you live, from within. For me, all writing is a process of discovery. We are looking for the meaning of life. No matter where you are, there are conflicts and dramas everywhere. It is the process of what it means to be a human being; how you react and are reacted upon, these inward and outer pressures. If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It's fatal for a fiction writer.