It seems to me to make as much sense to talk about literature as a large-scale human phenomenon without bringing in evolution as it does to engage in cosmology while you're thinking the universe is still geocentric.

Literature often gets taught nowadays as a record of the sins and shortcomings of the past. I see literature and the arts very differently: as essential to being human and to human progress, individual and collective.

Any artist who really engages with the problems in their medium at that moment and tries to deepen the problems is likely to discover new problems, new possibilities that will excite audiences and continue to excite them.

In fiction the story lives the more everyone comes to life, the more each character seems to exist in his or her own right.

It seems to me to make as much sense to talk about literature as a large-scale human phenomenon without bringing in evolution as it does to engage in cosmology while you're thinking the universe is still geocentric.

I think that's an important part of art in general. Especially in literature, in stories, we play with eventualities that may put us through a lot of intense negative feelings - say, in horror films or tragedies as intense as King Lear - but we come out feeling richer. We've lived to the fullest, we've tested ourselves in these environments.

I guess both Nabokov and Popper had, in different ways, immunized me against the fashion for French-influenced literary theory in the '70s, '80s, and '90s - "immunized" in the sense that they made me no longer susceptible to this epidemic cultural virus. I looked into Derrida and found that he rarely seemed to be interested in truth; he was more interested in making a splash.