All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.

I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn't speak for themselves.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.

But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.