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Writers aren't like plumbers. If you're a plumber, you fix one person's boiler in the morning, then you go and fix another in the afternoon. I didn't want to write a book unless I had something new to say - and it was good to live a little in between.

Mr. Donald Trump talking about the US Mexican border, he's not doing anything new or unusual. It's something that's very much in the air and perhaps always has been. The Great Wall of China has been there for a great long time. People have always tried to keep foreigners out. There is a very natural desire, once you've got somewhere cozy, to keep it to yourself, and equally there's a very strong impulse for those who are not at such a safe and prosperous place to try and get in. It's been creating conflict throughout human history.
Whereas if you're a reader, you can enter other people's minds, you can be in direct contact with people who may have lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. You can know what's like to be old if you're young or young if you're old. You can know what it's like to live in a completely different culture and really enter somebody else's mind. There's no amount of historical information that can give you access to the consciousness of a person from another culture or from the past in the way that reading really good novel from that place or time can.
Art and the triumph of the human spirit - the two combined thrill me. It's the "Braveheart" moment, the stuff Joseph Campbell talks about, "the heroes journey," a beautiful documentary on a poignant topic, the fireman saving a kitten from a burning building. It's the combo of heroism and kindness against the odds or even good reason. It implies immortality because it is the domain of the soul. That evidence of the spirit of life is what makes me get out of bed in the morning.

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