I think that people are going to move. They always have and that's going to continue. The question is, how are we going to deal with it?

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

What used to help us to cope with transience was stuff like, extended families all living in one place, or very strong religious beliefs, or a tribe that would outlive you. That stuff is getting weaker.

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.

A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.

If we want things to be okay, we will have to make things okay.

Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have certain experiences and those experiences, hopefully, have some impact on you.