You can see the diversity that pieces in the anthology represent, and then the interconnections-obvious and less obvious-between various stories or between various modes of storytelling. Diversity generates need for conversation, conversation generates common interests, as well as differences. Literature, as a human project, is all about that.

It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.

I'm bright, but there are lots of bright writers and people everywhere. In no way, at no point do I think I'm better than them.

What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility.

I cannot stand that whole game of confession, that is: Here I have sinned, now I'm confessing my sins, and describing my path of sin and then in the act of confession I beg for your forgiveness and redemption.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

The mind is complicated and you can't trace the roots of its processes, but there is something about mathematical and algorithmic patterns that I like to recognize in things.