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Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.

Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.

I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.

I am of the opinion that I am not a political writer, and, moreover, that as far as true literature is concerned, there actually are no political writers. I think that my writing is no more political than ancient Greek theatre. I would have become the writer I am in any political regime.

I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Politics is a matter of human transaction. I consider absolutely everything political, because all fiction involves relationships between people, and relationships between people always include matters of power, of equity, of communication.

In general, literature is a natural adversary of totalitarianism. Tyrannical governments all view literature in the same way: as their enemy. I lived for a long time in a totalitarian state, and I know firsthand that horror.