Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.

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.

I will say I am the sum of my books.

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

We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.