We all believe in the regulations, but you have to know how to interpret them. - Mario Vargas Llosa

Good literature erects bridges between different peoples, and by having us enjoy, suffer, or feel surprise, unites us beneath the languages, beliefs, habits, customs, and prejudices that separate us.

Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.

[T]here is literally no bastion of knowledge, not even in the exact sciences, that ideology, with its powers of distortion, cannot breach and into which lies useful to the cause cannot be implanted.