I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

The world is always in movement.

I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn't made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn't have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do.