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For a novelist, it's kind of an onerous burden to represent an entire culture.

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.

I always feel a responsibility to the people I write about. I feel obligated to portray them in the way they feel is proper.

Early on my career, I figured out that I just have to write the book I have to write at that moment. Whatever else is going on in the culture is just not that important. If you could get the culture to write your book, that would be great. But the culture can't write your book.

The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation. The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded.

A writer should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.

A culture produces ideas which are being explored, which of interest to that culture at that moment. And I think one of the things a writer can do is to take those ideas and go a bit further with them.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

Quite a lot is required of writers these days in terms of, if not promoting the work, then being a representative of the work. It's a difficult thing, really.

I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.