Europe has never been a monolithic space, it contains a lot of people, a lot of languages and infinite supplies of history. I didn't need to do anything to showcase diversity. It is a condition of life and art in Europe, contained in every random sample.

Outsider means "I will accept the possibility that I don't have responsibility for what is happening inside my domain."

I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.

Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.

There's a social and human necessity for some kind of continuity, but it's not axiomatic and not something you're born into; it's something you have to work at. And one of the ways to work at it - perhaps the best - is storytelling: telling stories about yourself to others, telling stories about yourself to yourself, telling stories about others to others.

No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.

It's difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.