My father used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. When the children would gather, at a certain point, I had a tendency to make up my own elementary variations on stories I had heard, or to invent totally new ones.

But when you're deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it's amazing.

Writers throughout the ages have one weapon, which is literature, but they also have their responsibilities as a citizen when literature does not seem to suffice. I mean, they are not mutually exclusive. One continues to write anyway but if you are called out to demonstrate, if people are being killed in the streets, it's hardly the moment to go for your pen and paper, you know, help in one way or the other.

Romance is the sweetening of the soul With fragrance offered by the stricken heart.

When a leader encourages the culture of impunity, the society is lost and it makes the work harder for the rest of us.

Under a dictatorship, a nation ceases to exist. All that remains is a fiefdom, a planet of slaves regimented by aliens from outer-space.

When you fight corruption, corruption strikes back and that is the truth because when you fight corruption, you get confidence and when it gets to impunity, then it gets aggressive and says, 'oh, so you think you are different? You think you are tough and different?' This is why some of us are almost permanently in the libel court.