When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of the reader in a well-told tale.

Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer; it's just to annoy you.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.

In our time, we have become too interested in the artist and his or her character and experience as a way of understanding art. In my view, you should be able to read a book or see a film without knowing a single thing about conditions or circumstances or character of the artist, and experience the work to the full without such information. Sometimes I feel - speaking for myself - that people know much too much about me, and I wish people knew less and could just read these books and respond to them purely as words on a page.

If you give in to the threat of violence, if you give in to bullying, what you know is that there will be more bullying. There will not be less bullying. If you appease the bully, you make sure that he will bully you some more. Not less. It doesn't solve the problem. It makes the problem worse.

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.