I've never had a stupid student in my life. I never look down on my students. I never thought, "Look at these people." I might argue with them and I think that some of them might have misconceptions - that they might be infected by the intellectual laziness that is the foundation of American popular culture, and of capitalism, if you wish. But part of my job as a teacher is to work with that - against that.

I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and 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 like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

There's something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we are the main characters.

Memory narrativises itself.