Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.

The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ‒ there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort.

Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better.

I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.

The talk shows in the States want celebrities, not authors. In France, it is different; writers are called upon to comment on everything. They have a very public role there.

My impulse is to create an aesthetic that's about a humanistic approach to a world and trying to create compassion for all the characters.