There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

Every great thinker is someone else's moron.

When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.

To escape the power of the unknown, to prove to yourself that you don't believe in it, you accept its spells. Like an avowed atheist who sees the Devil at night, you reason: He certainly doesn't exist; this is therefore an illusion, perhaps a result of indigestion. But the Devil is sure that he exists, and believes in his upside-down theology. What, then, will frighten him? You make the sign of the cross, and he vanishes in a puff of brimstone.

He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating.

I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.

I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.