A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new.

Some writers just write about their own lives. Well, I don't want to do that. I want to have a really boring life. A quiet, boring life so no one wants to write a biography. I'm the only writer in history only to have one wife, for instance.

We are animals and we are made in this way and this is how we behave. I'm just kind of fascinated by how we can deny that we are animals and what our impact on the other animals is like, and how quixotic we can be in trying to assess what we've done in trying to correct it.

If I'm doing my job correctly, I'm presenting a scenario for you as the reader to engage with on your own. I mean that's what the best art is supposed to do.

The very genetic determinism I posited in World's End as a way of shaking off my inherited demons is being proven in fact as we map out the human genome.

I love satire. Evelyn Waugh is one of my favorite writers of all time. He's hilarious. He's so wicked. He's so great. On the other hand, pure satire is an imitation. It doesn't really have any heart. It only holds things up to ridicule.

I was joking earlier when I said that all writers are manic depressives, but it's a joke with a lot of truth behind it. For fiction writers and poets, too, there's something wrong with you and you do this art as a way of correcting it or addressing it in some way.