“Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.”

“However, I have also argued for allegory’s positive effects. It is a process that typically takes control away from the author of a narrative and gives it to the reader. It is the reader who decides whether to interpret writing on a literal or a symbolic level. In giving greater control to the reader, allegory allows for imaginative and reflective analyses of mythology, and for its ideological purposes to be criticized, as well as affirmed.”

“Every reader his or her book.Every book its reader.”

“I am not a fiction reader. If I already do, I read fiction always more like the illustration of a philosophical-political thesis than a novel. My preference is history. If one does not know history, he is condemned to relive it.”

“Readers of my online journal - I refuse to use the word blog because it sounds like something that lives on a riverbed and communicates through farts”

“Fiction may be about lying – on the surface, anyway – but fiction is about hiding the truth behind those lies. It's about using those lies to say something true and real. It's about showing the reader something. It's about making them feel.And how we do that as authors is to put ourselves into our work, and make it mean something to us, so that it will mean something to the reader. That's what we should do. That's our job.”