It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

Lots of people want to have written; they don't want to write. In other words, they want to see their name on the front cover of a book and their grinning picture on the back. But this is what comes at the end of a job, not at the beginning.

I wish that I had known back then that a mastery of process would lead to a product. Then I probably wouldn't have found it so frightening to write.

What we are is what we were always meant to be, and that's writers.

Even the highest forms of sacrificial worship present much that is repulsive to modern ideas, and in particular it requires an effort to reconcile our imagination to the bloody ritual which is prominent in almost every religion which has a strong sense of sin.

For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker.

I want my music to be accessible to every listener because I know that I really have something to say in terms of really, you know, removing thorns from people, thorns that really makes us unaware that we are bleeding with these thorns, like pain, grief, jealousy and so on.

I always liked acting, but it was not that I was dying to become an actress. It just happened, and I am enjoying it.