I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist—books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.

As a journalist, I would talk to writers, directors, creative people, and discover that for an awful lot of them, the moment they became successful, that was all they were allowed to do. So you end up talking to the bestselling science-fiction author who wrote a historical-fiction novel that everybody loved, but no one would publish.

This is the only country in the world, that worries about what it is. The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are.

Have you thought about what it means to be a god?" asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. "It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.

Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.

And I would try and walk far enough away that people would not assume I was with him.

It's a wonderful thing, as a writer, to be given parameters and walls and barriers.