More and more I understand that it's very fine not to know where you come from.

I thought maybe I would become a god, or a goddess, or a president or a Nobel Prize winner.

I never even dreamt of being a writer because I didn't feel allowed. When I was a child I was terribly ambitious, but I didn't know at all what this great thing would become.

It's while writing that suddenly a point of view appears: 'So, that's what I really thought about this thing'. Then it feels part of me.

Definitely. More and more I understand that it's very fine not to know where you come from. There is line in a song by Georges Brassens [French singer-songwriter]: 'Les imbciles heureux qui sont ns quelquepart.' I will never be one of the happy stupid that were born somewhere. This way of life is excellent for the imagination. It develops your paranoia. You feel paranoid when you don't understand a country, and being paranoiac is excellent for fiction.

The purpose of the photograph is to reveal the love that is felt in a single image.

Of course you have memories, and these memories are convincing. But it's really at the moment when I write them down - when I write about my relationship with that Japanese boy in Ni d'Eve, Ni d'Adam - that they reach a degree of reality which is incandescent, that I've really conquered a story, understood it and feel that it is really part of me.