Literature often gets taught nowadays as a record of the sins and shortcomings of the past. I see literature and the arts very differently: as essential to being human and to human progress, individual and collective.

It seems to me to make as much sense to talk about literature as a large-scale human phenomenon without bringing in evolution as it does to engage in cosmology while you're thinking the universe is still geocentric.

Any artist who really engages with the problems in their medium at that moment and tries to deepen the problems is likely to discover new problems, new possibilities that will excite audiences and continue to excite them.

I think that's an important part of art in general. Especially in literature, in stories, we play with eventualities that may put us through a lot of intense negative feelings - say, in horror films or tragedies as intense as King Lear - but we come out feeling richer. We've lived to the fullest, we've tested ourselves in these environments.

In fiction the story lives the more everyone comes to life, the more each character seems to exist in his or her own right.

Perhaps the most demanding trick in all of art is to know ways that are going to capture the attention of an audience right now, and yet to also hold an audience hundreds or thousands of years into the future in circumstances you just cannot imagine. You've got to go very deep into human nature to do that.

Social media takes time and careful, strategic thought. It doesn't happen by accident.

Social media is your opportunity to reach a massive number of people with transparency, honesty, and integrity.