“Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.”

“It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.”

“In the end, I am quite normal. I don't have odd habits. I don't dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don't talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a f...”

“I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the indust...”

“I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it pro...”

“I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of thes...”

“I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the me...”

“Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.”

“Earning happiness means doing good and working, not speculating and being lazy. Laziness may look inviting, but only work gives you true satisfaction.”

“I am not saying that Hitler was a choir boy. But I am saying, let him who was innocent in the Second World War cast the first stone.”

“Who I am as a guitarist is defined by my failure to become Jimi Hendrix.”

“Pride is ugly. It says, 'If you succeed, I am a failure.'”

“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

“All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager forces at the service of continuity. That everything should continue as usual is the bourgeois s...”

“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.”