Many words will be written on the wind and the sand, or end up in some obscure digital vault. But the storytelling will go on until the last human being stops listening. Then we can send the great chronicle of humanity out into the endless universe.

Africa was the most exotic place I could conceive of - the end of the world - and I knew I would go there one day.

I do not understand how on earth you can become a writer without seeing the world.

My father thought, and now I think too, that the system of democracy is entirely based upon the system of justice. If we do not have a system of justice that people believe in, the system of democracy will fail.

Sex and death, the magnetic poles of fiction, attract us children's writers no less than adult authors, but we have to be more leery of their pull.

Nothing on this earth is standing still. It's either growing or it's dying. No matter if it's a tree or a human being.

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

What is the value of sticking a microphone in a man's face right after he has learned of his wife's death?