Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they shared not only linguistic meanings but also an experience and history. Those communities have progressively split in the twentieth century, and grown more heterogeneous, and writers emerging from minority communities have found themselves addressing audiences closer to their experience and history - a phenomenon derided by conservative white men as identity politics and multiculturalism in the arts.

To think that land reform is going to somehow automatically create an equitable system, I think that's just wrong. It's a very technical view of the world.

So much of democracy is built on antagonism. It institutionalizes a certain kind of antagonism. This is not to say that we shouldn't have any democracy, but the fact is that democracy has hardened political identities and made them more violent.

Most writers have very little that's important or valuable to offer; most of them are just repeating each other.

We are always boosting or trying to prop up the ego by fulfilling some desire or other, and always craving affirmation from the outside.

Whether you are in the West, the East, the North, or the South, we should all feel pressured to attempt more, find new ways of outwitting ourselves, in our writing and thinking.

The idea that human beings can make history, that is something quite unique to the modern West.