Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.

Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

If I represent the world as it is as harmonious, that's a political position.

There are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters in the stories of our lives. In other words, if we imagine ourselves brave or crazy or open, we're more likely to make decisions in a given situation based on how we imagine ourselves, whatever the facts may be.

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.

In the olden days, a memoir was something written by Churchill and people like that, because they had a grand experience and considered it useful for future generations. And then it became what it became - a public purging in which other people have the chance to judge you and then forgive you, perhaps learning something from your sorry example.