Many people come here and they think my apartment is a poor relative to my name. But you cannot be radical and have money, it’s impossible.

Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.

Everybody has to die, Firdaus. I will die, and you will die. The important thing is how to live until you die.

Love has made me a different person. It has made the world beautiful.

All the men I did get to know, every single man of them, has filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face.

I never stopped writing. I started writing when I was twelve years of age. And I was writing all the time. But nothing was translated until thirty years after I started writing, when The Hidden Face of Eve was translated in 1980.

First of all, all writing includes some part of the self. The relationship of the self and the other exists in writing, whether autobiographical or novel. There is a self and an other.