The words, the style always reflects a habit of mind. And the habit of mind comes in from a different angle. The habit of mind uses the colloquial here and uses the joke there. And then creates some discordant music and then something strange and wonderful happens. And you see things differently. You see a different light is shed on it.

Maybe the unconscious is overrated... What if your unconscious is full of false consciousness or bad faith? What if it's more like a trash compactor than a dre…

The culture as a whole is losing its individual notes, its diversity. And this is: it's not only sad. It's devastating. It's devastating because routine langua…

It makes me itchy, this wry fatalism, but it doesn't make me itch nearly as much as the heroes of so many other modern novels for whom stalking the savage libi…

The thing I liked about writing about food when I started it was that I felt I was writing about food in a different way. Not like a food writer.

What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself felt above that of the model...…

A good novelist, or so I have been taught in China, should be above all else tse ran, that is, natural, unaffected, and so flexible and variable as to be wholl…