1. “A good novel is a conjunction of main factors, the main of which is without doubt, hard work.”
2. “Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.”
3. “Revolution will free society of its afflictions , while science will free the individual of his.”
4. “No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something while despair is nothing.”
5. “Violence represents the worst form of conformism.”
6. “Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.”
7. “We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.”
8. “Silence is the only a candle glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern.”
9. “Memory is a snare, pure an simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.”
10. “The can’t fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.”
11. “Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual’s sovereignty.”
12. “The secret to a masterpiece is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.”
13. “It isn’t true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.”
14. “There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.”
15. “The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be subsidized by the state. It leads to an intellectual an artistic castration.”
16. “If you are killed because you are a writer, that’s the maximum expression of respect, you know.”
17. “Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social or cultural debate.”
18. “Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.”
19. “It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.”
20. “Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.”
