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

I am happy to accept that badge of ambivalence if that means some progress in dismantling this false opposition: writers boldly using their privileges of free speech in the morally superior West versus pathetic wimps in repressive countries we don't like.

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.

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

In the modern world, nationalism remains a very important force. We delude ourselves into thinking that globalization has made all of that redundant and that everyone just wants to be like America.

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.

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.