If you think that what you're doing is not all that important in the larger scheme of things and that you're just an insignificant creature in the whole wide world, which is full of six billion people, and that people are born and die every day and it makes no difference to future generations what you write, and that writing and reading are increasingly irrelevant activities, you'd probably never get out of bed.

We need a more complex understanding of writers working under authoritarian or repressive regimes. Something to replace this simpleminded, Cold War-ish equation in which the dissident in exile is seen as a bold figure, and those who choose to work with restrictions on their freedom are considered patsies for repressive governments. Let's not forget that most writers in history have lived under nondemocratic regimes: Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Goethe didn't actually enjoy constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech.

The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to reading and writing.

Today, practically every country outside the West is undergoing an intellectual, political, and cultural churning, from China to Bolivia, Egypt to Indonesia, but we haven't really had, after the 1960s, a major oppositional culture in Western Europe and America. The Occupy movement was so startling and welcome partly because it was the first such eruption of mass protests in decades.

Despite all the boosterish talk of globalization breaking down barriers, most writers in Anglo-America are still working within the nationalist assumptions of their traditionally powerful societies.

I think our conception of literature should accommodate not only apolitical writers but also those whose political opinions we find unpalatable. Fiction after all comes from a different, less rationally manipulable side of the brain. I am personally very attached to reactionary figures like Dostoyevsky, Hamsun, and Céline.

Western conception of history has had great consequences over the last two hundred years. You see it in the invasion of Iraq. You see it in almost everything that is said and done.