If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is.
There's a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can - hubris, I suppose - without stopping to work out why.
People like to say that East Asians in general, and Japanese in particular, are not very expressive: there's that term 'inscrutable.' But often, Europeans just don't get the Asian codes. Believe me, the message is being expressed OK.
I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.
When you're out of your own cultural context you have conversations with yourself that you just don't have at any other point in your life. When you're in a hotel room on the border between India and Nepal you can really discover things about yourself.
I think it's natural for youth to be drawn to newness: The world is still new for them.
The art of the novelist is not unrelated to the illness of multiple personality disorder. It's a much milder form. But the better the book, the nearer to the padded cell you are.
I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.
'Y' is about the weakest letter of all. 'Y' can't make up its mind if it's a vowel or a consonant, can it?
