Quote

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

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

What I'm interested in is how people are reading and writing English.

Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.

Language is a social art.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

I think with all my books, language has been their subject as much as anything else. Language can elide or displace or sideline whole groups of people. You can't necessarily change the way language is used, but if it becomes something you're conscious of... that gives you a certain power over it.

Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.

I am not a political writer. I agree with Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, who are social writers. I can't write in that fashion. I am not good enough for that. What I am interested in is family dramas and why we are doing bad things to each other and what our motives are.

What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.