The most important training though is to experience life as a writer questioning everything inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that all the other things will come if you don't there's no hope for you.

But because we've all been readers we know what the experience is like and we hope that what certain writers have given to us we will give to someone.

A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.

In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war literature was careful not to do the same which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.

I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted devoting hours and hours and hours to it.

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela where I couldn't find a place for myself for years and years.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

A spy like a writer lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.