You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.

Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.

By perceiving ourselves as part of the river, we take responsibility for the river as a whole.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

If a single writer in a country is in chains, then there are some links of that chain that binds us all.

Barack Obama is president of a superpower and I'm a citizen of a small state.

But if I were to say who influenced me most, then I'd say Franz Kafka. And his works were always anchored in the Central European region.