Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.

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 resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

For a fight to be productive, or at least relevant, writers should fight over different demands they put upon writing (as an individual, private act) and literature (a network of relations in which we are all involved).