First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

If an idea seems to find its way towards a stage setting, that's the direction I take. I don't know if I'm trying to achieve anything other than to follow an idea on to the page.

For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.

I would never write in response to what I believe the public wanted or needed.