Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination--and therefore fiction--is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.

Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle."

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.

I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.