I've noticed it a lot. I'm not someone who revises. It's always the first movement, it's that. It's an instinct. Either it works straight away, or it won't ever work.

When I want to be incognito, I don't wear any hat. Unfortunately, even without the hat, they now recognise me in Paris.

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.

Luckily I haven't fallen into the trap, which has claimed so many writers, of living from day to day thinking 'Ah, I'll write a book about that.'

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

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

Japanese women live in fear of making the least sound in a bathroom stall. Japanese men pay no attention to the subject whatsoever.