My home is a portable one. I used to quote to my students Vladimir Nabokov saying that a writer's books are his identity papers. And this is really good because on one hand we live in a world with boundaries and nationalities and specific identities, on the other we need the world of imagination, which is without boundaries. I call it the Republic of Imagination.

This is a romantic and, at the same time, a universal ideal. We all need ideals that seem impossible in order for us to continue. Otherwise we will stop striving.