The asymmetries of power that have shaped relations between the West and the rest of the world also exist in the realm of literary criticism.

The longing for a very garish kind of success seems as widespread among writers as among investment bankers.

Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee great literature.

I think the reporter or journalist is well served by having a responsibility to the powerless, to use a much-abused cliché. The voice of the powerless is in some danger of not being heard in the elite discourses we now have in the mainstream media.

The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers - Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in the Soviet Union - who have conducted their arguments with their societies and its political arrangements through their art in subtle, oblique ways. They didn't always have the license to make bold pronouncements about freedom, democracy, Islam, and liberalism, but they exerted another kind of moral authority through their work.

Most people turn things like elections into a fetish and think it's the only way to go: if we just keep giving people the vote, that'll solve all our problems. In the end, that's just a silly, infantile notion.

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.