Fernando Vallejo

"Society rewards the cruel and punishes the compassionate."

"To write is to commit treason against your own people."

"The human condition is fundamentally tragic."

"Love is merely the projection of our own needs onto another person."

"Death is the only honest thing in human existence."

"Religion is the opiate that keeps the masses docile."

"Art must challenge comfort and comfort the challenged."

"We are all exiles in our own homeland."

"The novelist is a chronicler of the invisible."

"Money corrupts everything it touches, absolutely."

"Beauty is a fleeting deception of the senses."

"The educated are often the most blind to reality."

"Power consolidates through forgetting."

"Language imprisons us even as we use it to express ourselves."

"The greatest tragedy is not suffering, but meaningless suffering."

"Patriotism is nationalism dressed in respectable clothes."

"To live authentically requires the courage to be an outsider."

"The state exists to perpetuate itself, not to serve humanity."

"Forgetting is a form of mercy."

"We are prisoners of language and culture."

"Art is the only remaining form of truth-telling."

"Happiness is for those who lack imagination."

"The only freedom we have is the freedom to imagine."

"History is written by those with the power to enforce forgetting."

"Mortality is the one absolute democracy."

"Every act of creation is an act of rebellion."

"The past never truly dies; it only waits for resurrection."

"To understand a nation, understand its literature."

"Solitude is the price of authenticity."

"The written word is our only defense against historical amnesia."