Don’t write in public places. In the early 1990s I went to live in Paris. The usual writerly reasons: back then, if you were caught writing in a pub in England, you could get your head kicked in, whereas in Paris, dans les cafés . . . Since then I’ve developed an aversion to writing in public. I now think it should be done only in private, like any other lavatorial activity.

I believe that that is a fast-food myth to get us out there buying whatever they’re selling because I know that beans and greens are very, very affordable.

I have been suspected of utopian thinking more than once, and particularly when five years ago I proposed the elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2000 and joint efforts to create a system of international security. It may well be that by that date it will not have happened. But look, merely five years have passed and have we not actually and noticeably moved in that direction?

Now according to me, and this is my cosmology scheme, which I'm having trouble persuading the cosmologists about, is that when the universe is rid of pretty well all its matter, it in a certain sense forgets how big it is. Now that's a crazy idea, but you see if you don't have any mass around you don't have any way of scaling the size of the universe, and so it in effect becomes the big bang of the next aeon as I'm calling it – A E O N. So according to my scheme, the universe as we currently understand it, which is from big bang, and then there's this inflationary phase which I don't believe in, which is supposed to take place very, very early on, and then the universe has this more sedate expansion, and then it has another exponential expansion, and that's it. According to me, that's not it. It morphs into the next big bang.

My country is a country of teachers. It is therefore a country of peace. We discuss our successes and failures in complete freedom. Because our country is a country of teachers, we closed the army camps, and our children go with books under their arms, not with rifles on their shoulders. We believe in dialogue, in agreement, in reaching a consensus. We reject violence. Because my country is a country of teachers, we believe in convincing our opponents, not defeating them. We prefer raising the fallen to crushing them, because we believe that no one possesses the absolute truth.

Seeing that the past dictatorships were only capable of creating misery and crippling hope, how absurd to pretend to cure the evils of one extreme dictatorship by means of its opposite! No one in Central America has the right to fear freedom, no one is entitled to preach absolute truths. The evils of one dogma are the evils of any dogma. They are all the enemies of human creativity.

History was not written by men who predicted failure, who gave up their dreams, who abandoned their principles, who allowed their laziness to put their intelligence to sleep. If certain men at times were alone in seeking victory, they always had at their side the watchful spirit of their peoples, the faith and destiny of many generations.