"(How important is diversity in literature?) I suppose, in order to understand how other people live and what it is that motivates and energises and makes them happy and unhappy you have to know about other people. It’s really quite as simple as that. You have to know. And the best way to know about other people is to hear what they have to say and not to be ventriliquising other people’s lives and trying to explain people away. So in this respect writing from other places, or at least from other perspectives, which might be cultural, social, gender, is one of the most direct ways in which you can hear what other people are saying."