I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

History is the lies of the victors,

[Literature is] a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.

All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.