“Writing is hard work, and if anything’s true about the process, it’s that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper.”

All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.

What’s less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I’ve changed the cat little because I didn’t know what my characters were going to say next.

Today, tomorrow,” she said. “A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.

And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.

Still, I’d thought I’d had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

Where we are from… [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro.

. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn’t speak for themselves.

Sometimes in life, things happen that will knock you back. Hell, you may get beaten to your knees but you must never ALLOW this world to knock you down!

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

But, in North Korea, it’s just the opposite. There’s one story. It’s written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous.

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

I don’t think there’s anything that I would call essentially Brazilian in João Gilberto Noll work. In that regard, it translates very well to a cosmopolitan audience.

We need to block out the outside world; we need to disbelieve anything that would doubt us, because everyone will doubt us if we allow them that space.

Of course, what’s not universal is talent. Are you making anything that anyone really should see?

But what you realise after you’ve been in the business for a while is that people develop opinions about you that don’t have anything to do with your music, they like or dislike you for a million reasons, they like or dislike you for your last record.

I don’t have anything against my mom, but my family has no emotional connection to each other.

I’m not afraid of anything that might happen to me on this earth, because I know no matter what, nothing can take my spirit from me.

I asked a boy begging on the streets, ‘If you could have anything in the world, what would you want?’ and he answered me with two words: ‘A pencil.’ Luckily, I had one in my pocket, and in the second it took me to give it to him, a defining dream was born.

I have fun. I always have fun. I don’t really get in a hurry about anything. I just try to go with the flow and have fun, and that’s how I try to play baseball.