If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.

You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.

I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books - there are a lot of people like that! That's my audience.

I have a very serious censorship office inside my head; it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don't want to be the person to stick that in your brain.

I don't just want my books to be about the '30s and '40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as '40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.

You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.