I write about my region, the countryside in which I grew up.

One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety.

Where there's life, death is inevitable. Dying's easy; it's living that's hard. The harder it gets, the stronger the will to live. And the greater the fear of death, the greater the struggle to keep on living.

All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout-nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be controlled and initiated by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I'll remain a member of the loyal opposition.

Possibly because I've lived so much of my life in difficult circumstances, I think I have a more profound understanding of life.

I have always been independent. I like it that way. When someone forces me to do something, I don't do it.

I think writers write for their consciences, they write for their own true audiences, for their souls.