A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.

Are you an angel that approaching you should be so terrifying?

I believe strongly in an author's moral responsibility. But his first obligation is to write good books.

Football can teach us that although a team's individual players may be weak, it can still be successful if it uses common sense. Or that we should not attack anyone physically when we suffer a depressing defeat.

My decision to view the world through novels, as it were, which is a typically European way of looking at things, became a heavy burden for me. But I took it on consciously, even though it was torture for me.

How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?

When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.