Novelist Juha Seppälä

"Every era produces in its time a certain type of experience. Anxiety is no longer the underlying emotional state. It's emptiness. Nothing is enough, nothing feels like anything. Life has no meaning, no values. This kind of person is an easy mark for the entertainment industry. Where there's much emptiness, there's also much to be filled -- and there's no shortage of those ready to fill it."

"The global economy has begun to live a life of its own, like the exercise machine in the movie Lost in Translation, which buffets its user about like crazy. It's a machine from [hades], out of the reach of political regulation and controlled by no one."

"Politics is a power game cloaked in substance, with the emphasis on the former. For that reason, Big Brother is perhaps a more intellectually honest environment than the politics of the day. Big Brother is openly dreadful, exploitative, and defamatory."

"Lucid observations of the world are more offensive than we want to hear from the mouths of the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia has become harmless, reduced to branding and marketing itself. The argument or thesis has become a luxury item in art."

"The greatest hope of the novelist isn't to create an immortal theme, but to create some way to empty one's head for a couple of months of anything that remotely smells of literature."

"I can't do anything else [but write], I don't know how I could. It can't be shut down. I have to write all the time, all my life. It's like an inescapable curse. There's nothing romantic about it, and it's seldom even fun. I feel beaten up after writing."