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.

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 and the other arts play with pattern - our brains understand our world by recognizing patterns - and with possibility. The arts harness our sharpest senses, sight and sound, and our richest ways of understanding, in language and narrative. They were our first schools before schools were ever invented. They develop our imaginations, extend our possibilities, and deepen what we can all share.

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.

Perhaps the most demanding trick in all of art is to know ways that are going to capture the attention of an audience right now, and yet to also hold an audience hundreds or thousands of years into the future in circumstances you just cannot imagine. You've got to go very deep into human nature to do that.

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

There's a young Danish guy who has done a lot of work from an evolutionary perspective, Mathias Clasen. Basically, his argument is we've evolved to fear the monstrous, to be very wary of large, unknown, life-threatening forces. In art, we can play with these things in ways that allow us to feel the intensity of the horror, but in "safe mode," if you like, detached from real consequences.