Small things start us in new ways of thinking

It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.

If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.

You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.