See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.
When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.
For a country to have a great writer ... is like having another government. That’s why no régime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
Years of imprisoning and beheading writers never succeeded in shutting them out. However, placing them in the heart of a market and rewarding them with a lot of commercial success, has.
What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?
The thing that was important to me about Hemingway at the time was that Hemingway taught me that you could be a writer and get away with it.
I don't buy into the idea that an Irish writer should write about Ireland, or a gay writer should write about being gay.
Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.
I am of the firm opinion that no one should tell writers what to do, or what to write, or how to write.
I'm for anything that lets writers stretch, in or out of their series.
I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don't think your work is quite as universal.
