As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.

A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands.

The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.

In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.

Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.

I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.