Our traditional stories are based on an aristocratic model without a middle class, whereas The Arabian Nights reflect people living in cities, traders, merchants, travelers, with a wide range of personalities.

The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain.

I think that a true economics thinker or a Marxist thinker would make nonsense of my argument, although I have given massive seminars and no one has demolished it so far. I did think that this idea from an artisanal and trading perception of the auratic quality of goods when they are given character and inscription, made the stories of phantasmic wealth read more powerfully in the 18th and 19th centuries than the stories of Cinderella's wealth, because they are conjured out of nothing by these magic means.

I avoid looking in the mirror.

The model of the educational Kalila Wa-Dimna. These are books of instruction to rulers and humans. The stories unfold a range of human psychology, a vast range of human psychology. The Sultan is being moved from his narrow and bigoted position into a wider, more subtle, more nuanced understanding of human experiences.

I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.

I always have done work on mythic relations since I started writing. I really want to be a novelist, or at least a writer of imaginative work... I do try to make my critical studies imaginative and try to write them in ways that are more like literature than philosophy, but I have disappointed myself because I am still so wedded to criticism.