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 these; it's not simply telling a story.

Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974.

I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.

Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there?

We've always operated under the belief that you could run a video game business as professionally as you could run a consumer packaged goods business, and you wouldn't diminish creativity.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

You are preparing yourself for a scene, and the most important thing is to remain emotionally available and remain in the moment with your scene partner. You don't want to let your own self-consciousness block the flow of creativity that's coming out so that you can act and react, and play what the scene is all about.

Creativity, for me, is almost like therapy; my songs take you into the underbelly of my mind, and there's some dark stuff in there.