In the theatre, you are in love with what is on the stage, with the moment. You just don't get that with movies or videos, or TV, where you know that what you are seeing is repeatable.

Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.

I think it is an important question of our lives - what is the meaning of literature to us as humans.

One has to choose a word in English. If you want to be eligible for a literary prize you have to designate it as something.

The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant . What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary.

It is terribly important to maintain a national identity in a way that it probably wasn't before.

You turn your life into a work of art in order to redeem the ordinariness - a condition you are stuck with.