It is easier to imagine the death of one person than that of a hundred or a thousand... Multiplied, suffering becomes abstract. It is not easy to be moved by abstract things.

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In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.

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You cannot teach creativity—how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.” Mario Vargas Llosa.

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Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

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Science is still only a candle glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern.

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Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.

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No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

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Although they say that only idiots are happy, I confess that I felt happy.

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One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.

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Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

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