When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.

In the end you're not made or broken by prizes. Your relationship is with your readers, not a prize, and you just have to keep on honoring that.

One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.

Literary prizes serve a purpose if they allow for discussion of books.

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.

The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it - I think the opposite is true.