"I don't want to persuade the reader that it's a real thing; I want to show it as it is. In a sense, I'm telling those readers that it's just a story: it's fake. But when you experience the fake as real, it can be real. It's not easy to explain . . .
I'm not pretending it's the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same: we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it's a commitment; it's a true relationship. That's what I want to write about."
- Haruki Murakami
a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts."
- Vladimir Nabokov
