“The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly.”
“[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.”
“I was interested in this because it bore out an opinion of mine that philosophy is an affair of character rather than of logic: the philosopher believes not according to evidence, but according to his own temperament; and his thinking merely serves to make reasonable what his instinct regards as true.”
“If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.”
“But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.”
“The world lies in the hands of those that have the courage to dream and who take the risk of living out their dreams - each according to his or her own talent.”