Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today's program is the last in our special series,

Escaping the Cage, Identity, Multiculturalism, and Writing.

This is novelist Russell Banks.

I've spent most of my adult life, either in the

border between Florida and the Caribbean or the northern border of the United States in a very

literal and physical sense. But I've always felt as though I was on the borders of identity

between other human beings, between men and women,

between white people and black people, between Americans and non-Americans,

between adults and children.

In a sense, this is the location of my imagination.

I don't feel comfortable with one identity.

This is novelist, essayist, and filmmaker Susan Sontag.

I don't think of the work as reflecting me any more than more generally speaking, I think that I write to express myself. I don't think I'm writing

to express myself or to define myself. I think of those as low, ignoble motives. Now, of course,

I'm sure I do express myself in my writing, and I'm sure I do

define myself in my writing, but that's not the point, the purpose, the intention, the goal.

...