Viet Thanh Nguyen

And so, you know, we have to remember with The Sympathizer, I set out to try to offend everybody.

Americans, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, anti-communist, pro-communist, and judging from my hate mail, I succeeded.

So when I finished, I thought, who else is there left to offend?

The French.

And so The Committed continues the adventures of our protagonist, who is this mixed-race French and Vietnamese communist spy in Paris, the land of his father.

And so anyway, when I wrote that novel, again, I didn't care.

And so it made no difference to me that the first one won the Pulitzer Prize because I had to keep that same conviction that what really mattered was the art, nothing else.

I think we all have illusions about

illusions about ourselves, illusions about the world.

We're raised in certain ways and we're told, hey, this matters, that matters, this prize, this accomplishment, that school, those people, their opinions.

And we've all imbibed that to one degree or another.

And then I think as one gets older, for many of us, there is a process of disillusionment.

It's called growing up.

And for some people, they become cynical.

You don't have to become cynical.

You just have to realize that the world is a beautiful place.

Many beautiful things like art that are made by people and people...

mess these beautiful things up.

There's nothing that human beings have invented, nothing beautiful that they haven't also messed up at the same time.

And that's the paradox of being human.