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English culture is highly literary-based.

Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature.

I'm not into high literature, but I think all my books are literate.

Literature offers not just a window into the culture of diverse regions, but also the society, the politics; it's the only place where we can keep track of ideas.

I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.

Literary readings aren't going to shake their reputation as the added-fibre of our entertainment diet until the people who organize and participate in them snap out of this mentality.

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.

It's never really easy to be successful as a writer when you're trying to write literary fiction. You've already limited your readership limited by that choice.

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.