It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

Writers do not come out of houses without books.

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.