On a stable humor – Ismail Kadare interviewed by Shusha Guppy in The Paris Review in 1998:

‘For example, they say that contemporary literature is very dynamic because it is influenced by the cinema, the television, the speed of communication. But the opposite is true! If you compare the texts of the Greek antiquity with today’s literature, you’ll notice that the classics operated in a far larger terrain, painted on a much broader canvas, and had an infinitely greater dimension—a character moves between sky and earth, from a god to a mortal, and back again, in no time at all! The speed of action, the cosmic vision in a page and a half of the second book of the Iliad is impossible to find in a modern author. The story is simple: Agamemnon has done something that has displeased Zeus, who decides to punish him. He calls a messenger and tells him to fly to earth, find the Greek general called Agamemnon, and put a false dream into his head. The messenger arrives in Troy, finds Agamemnon asleep, pours a false dream into his head like a liquid, and goes back to Zeus. In the morning Agamemnon calls his officers and tells them that he has had a beautiful dream and that they should attack the Trojans. He suffers a crushing defeat. All that in a page and a half! One passes from Zeus’s brain to Agamemnon’s, from the sky to earth. Which writer today could invent that? Ballistic missiles are not as fast!’

(…)

‘I was sent to the Gorky Institute to become an official writer of the regime—it was a factory for fabricating dogmatic hacks of the socialist-realism school. In fact, they took three years to kill every creativity, every originality you possessed. Luckily I was already immunized by what I had read. At the age of eleven I had read Macbeth, which had hit me like lightning, and the Greek classics, after which nothing had any power over my spirit. What was happening in Elsinor or by the ramparts of Troy seemed to me more real than all the wretched banality of socialist-realist novels.
At the institute I was disgusted by the indoctrination, which in a way saved me. I kept telling myself that on no account must I do what they taught me but the exact opposite. Their official writers were all slaves of the party, except for a few exceptions like Konstantin Paustovsky, Chukovsky, Yevtushenko.
During my stay at the institute I wrote a novel called “The Town Without Publicity.” When I returned to Albania I was worried about showing it to anyone. I published a short extract in a magazine entitled “A Day at the Café,” which was immediately banned. No longer was there any question of publishing the book. The head of the Communist Youth Organization who had recommended its publication was later accused of liberalism and condemned to fifteen years of imprisonment. Luckily this extract exists; otherwise no one today would believe that I wrote the novel. It was the story of two literary crooks who want to falsify a text in order to prove that it can be adapted to Marxism, thereby advancing their careers. It tapped into the fundamental problem at the core of socialist culture—falsification. This novel will be published in the sixth volume of my complete works, which my French publishers are preparing. Not a word of it will be changed.’ (…)

‘Every regime needs to save face with respect to the international community, and if you are a famous writer the regime has to be careful. Hoxha wanted to be considered a poet, a Sorbonne student, a writer, not a murderer. The only thing that a writer could do under such a dictatorship was to try to produce true literature. That way one does one’s duty for eternity. To expect anything else is cynical and criminal. The Albanians had in me a writer who connected them with the world. I dominated our cultural life and I was safeguarding Albanian culture with my work, for there was on one side what I was creating on the other the Communist product, which was worthless. When a book of mine was published, in fifteen minutes it was sold out—every copy was immediately bought. People knew that it would probably be banned, so they rushed to buy it before it was. Sometimes the book was banned before distribution, but by then thousands of copies were in circulation and people passed them on to one another.’

(…)

‘You need a stable humor; both happiness and unhappiness are bad for literature. When you are happy, you tend to become light, frivolous, and if you are unhappy your vision becomes perturbed. You have to live first, experience life, and later write about it.’

Read the interview here.

Live first, write about it later. A stable humor. And a sense of trust in the classics.

In 2010 I met Kadare at a symposium in Cologne, he said that the best way to get through a totalitarian regime consisted of silent contempt.
The rest is work and tiny bit of talent.

See also here.