When I think about why I would be a writer, why I should continue to be a writer, it seems to me one of the few things you can dowhere you're never bored.

A white person was by definition somebody. Other people needed, across their hearts, one steel rib.

It's human to hear stories and to know how people live and to imagine how that is for them. It's very interdependent!

A man was the sum of his limits; freedom only made him see how much so.

I think that there is a bias in the current literary climate, which is not only very Western but very male.

... there is ... a big aspect of play in writing novels, and making the story more and more elaborate is just more and more fun.

It's a matter of whether you see the self as fundamentally in relationship to other selves or not - whether you see the boundary between self and the world as relatively permeable, which makes you "interdependent" (collectivist) in outlook, or relatively impermeable, which makes you "independent" (individualistic).