Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship. - Ismail Kadare

I became familiar with literature before I knew freedom, so that it was literature that led me to liberty, not the other way around. Faith in literature and in the creative process brings protection. It generates antibodies that allow you to struggle against state terror.

If an animal has to be sacrificed when a new bridge is built, what will it take to build a whole new world?

To tell the truth, this was one of the few cases in which she had not told him just what she was thinking. Usually, she let him know whatever thoughts happened to come to her, and indeed he never took it amiss if she let slip a word that might pain him, because when all was said and done that was the price one paid for sincerity.