Historical novels are about costumery. I think that's the magic and mystery of fiction. I don't want to write historical fiction but I do want the story to have the feel of history. There's a difference.

What hasty preparations we make for our future. Think of it: it seems almost tragic, the things we're sure we ought to bring along. We pack too heavy with what we hope we'll use, and too light of what we must. We thus go forth misladen, ill equipped for the dawn.

Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

By definition it uses and plays and delights in time. It delights in the interlacing of chronologies and the consequences of that interlacing. And those have personal and psychological expressions in a character. Aside from other issues of writing, psychological characterization is what narrative can do best.

The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

We can skip through a lot of the stuff people might ask about the writing of the book, and so their comments always start well, well down into the nitty-gritty.

To be honest, Im not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.