There is this idea of history as something you make, as a meaningful narrative with a beginning and an end, the end being a utopia of happiness that we'll reach through socialism or free trade or democracy, and then it will all be wonderful.

Modernity has created more problems than it is capable of solving. Millions of people are now condemned to wait endlessly for their redemption through modernity.

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.

Most books germinate within you for a long time before they are ready to come out. I wrote several drafts of the novel over many years and when I finally got to the last one, it didn't take much time.

You have to be able to decide, 'Well no, I'm not going to be violent, I'm going to suppress that impulse; I'm not going to be greedy.' Unless you're able to do that you're stuck with adversarial politics that leads nowhere and creates ever greater violence.

Our tolerance of the intolerable found a low threshold as early as the late 1950s with the grotesque excesses of McCarthyism, which destroyed so many honest lives, and then with the insane nuclear arms race and confrontations.

We need to infuse politics with ideas like compassion and empathy, and a sense that we live in an interdependent world.