The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.

I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

“One Minus One’”and “Barcelona, 1975” are more or less autobiographical.

It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.