We cannot abandon this rabbit hole for fear of a traumatic encounter with our own culture.

Our politics is very masculine, very aggressive, and it's very polarizing. And the pace of this development has increased in recent years. Erdogan is, in my eyes, the most polarizing politician in recent Turkish political history.

Time is just an illusion. What you need is to live this very moment. That is all that matters.

Isn't connecting people to distant lands and culture one of the strengths of good literature?

Words are heavy in Turkey, and every writer, every poet and every journalist knows that, because of a word, because of a sentence, because of a tweet or even a retweet, you can be sued, you can be demonized by the media and you can even land in prison.

I see two opposite tendencies in Turkish society: people feel demoralized, they lose the interest in politics and retreat to their private lives; or they become very angry and even more politicized, and radicalized. Both trends are troublesome.

The digital world is developing with such force and such a pace that you simply can't ban or control it. People want to be globally connected.