Until I reached my late teens, there was not enough money for luxuries - a holiday, a car, or a computer. I learned how to program a computer, in fact, by reading a book. I used to write down programs in a notebook and a few years later when we were able to buy a computer, I typed in my programs to see if they worked. They did. I was lucky.

My own disposition is to trust the reader. Of course, there's a line between trusting the reader and expecting her to read your mind. That's where a friend or an editor comes in. A great editor will tell you straight when you've drifted into the latter territory.

The difference does not lie in the things that news does that novels do not do, but in the things that novels do that news cannot do. In other words, this basic technique of news - just one among many - is something a novel can use, but a novel can deploy a multitude of other techniques also. Novels are not bound by the rules of reportage. Far from it. They're predicated on delivering experience.

A poison can hardly be called safe if for some reason specific to me it's ineffective against, say, my body. But the power of story on the human mind is such that anecdote is often more persuasive than numbers. That's why news stories often concretize the impact of a change in government policy by following the story of one person.

Novels need readers of a certain kind, people who are patient and enjoy immersing themselves in another perspective for uninterrupted stretches of time. Reading habits might well be changing. People who pay for novels might overlap significantly with those who engage in Twitter and Facebook.

Experience belongs to the actor, but the story belongs to the teller. We write so we will never forget.

The mathematical tilt remains basic to my epistemological perspective, my howling plea in the still of night for epistemic humility. Mathematics gave me that as, also, did the difficulty I had in talking to my parents. How proofs are conceived is unfathomable. Clearly, there are certain conditions in which the revelation takes place.