Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up.

I'll tell you what divorce hasn't taught me. It didn't teach me not to get married again.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.