I am very interested in what has been called bad taste. I believe the fear of displaying a soi-disant bad taste stops us from venturing into special cultural zones.

It doesn’t matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope.

I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.

I’m not a best-seller, but through translations, I’ve accumulated some money.

I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn’t have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue.

It’s essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied.

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

The translator’s task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That’s hard!

The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn’t have a personal point of view, it’s impossible to be...

I’m not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot.