I don’t know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.
There’s something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we are the main characters.
If you have information you’ve got the world by the balls. But we have to convert information into knowledge in order to make it humanly useful.
It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories – I think it’s evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories.
I’ve read books in school that were written by ideological rote – they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.
Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.
I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.
I want a book to contain a world – indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.
Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.
Literature is always something – it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.
The balls do not make a writer.
It’s not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.
As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.
Every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate – it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it.
No reader owes me anything – I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.
It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.
To me, the solidarity of readers is far more important than the solidarity of writers, particularly since readers in fact find ways to connect over a book or books, whatever they may be.
Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.
I like the idea of a book being a democratic space which readers enter, carrying their own thoughts, and participate in a conversation, or experience of grace.
What you demand from storytelling is a moral – even political – import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.
I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.