But People Do Things To Survive, And

Where We Are From... [s]tories Are Factual. If A Farmer Is Declared A Music Virtuoso By The State, Everyone Had Better Start Calling Him Maestro. And Secretly, He'd Be Wise To Start Practicing The Piano. For Us, The Story Is More Important Than The Person. If A Man And His Story Are In Conflict, It Is The Man Who Must Change.

The Urge To Create A Fictional Narrative Is A Mysterious One, And When An Idea Comes, The Writer's Sense Of What A Story Wants To Be Is Only Vaguely Visible Through The Penumbra Of Inspiration.

The Light, The Sky, The Water, They Were All Things You Looked *through* During The Day. At Night, They Were Things You Looked *into*. You Looked *into* The Stars, You Looked *into* Dark Rollers And The Surprising Platinum Flash Of Their Caps.

In America, The Stories We Tell Ourselves And We Tell Each Other In Fiction Have To Do With Individualism. Every Person Here Is The Center Of His Or Her Own Story. And Our Job As People And As Characters Is To Find Our Own Motivations And Desires, To Overcome Conflicts And Obstacles Toward Defining Ourselves So That We Grow And Change.

The Death Of Dictator Kim Jong-il Has Cast All Eyes On North Korea, A Country Without Literature Or Freedom Or Truth.