I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.

I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.