I think like almost everything in evolution, the old forms persist. New forms come along - not always, of course; there are species and whole lineages that go extinct - but basically novels and plays, and so on, will continue to exist. Jokes, as the lowest-cost form of narrative, will certainly continue to exist. They're a bit like microbes in the biological world. They're low-cost and they're everywhere. They're the most successful form of life, even though they're not the ones we think about most.

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.

Popper and Nabokov are very different people in some ways - and I'm ready to devote large chunks of my life to both of them. Popper didn't think much of words but thought ideas mattered, and Nabokov didn't think much of ideas, but words mattered, and so on. But both of them had a sense that this is a world of infinite discovery, unending discovery. That quest to discover more in any direction is what I think drives me, and what drives humans, when they're doing the most interesting things.

I would be very surprised if on another planet we discovered a species as intelligent as humans that didn't have narrative, or didn't have art in general.

I think like almost everything in evolution, the old forms persist. New forms come along - not always, of course; there are species and whole lineages that go extinct - but basically novels and plays, and so on, will continue to exist. Jokes, as the lowest-cost form of narrative, will certainly continue to exist. They're a bit like microbes in the biological world. They're low-cost and they're everywhere. They're the most successful form of life, even though they're not the ones we think about most.

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.

Scientists, to give them credit, do not think of the humanities in a negative way. It's the bureaucrats who want to cut costs who think, Well, here's something that's not booming at the moment, let's slash it.