The East was no longer a threat to the western world, and when there's nothing to fear we turn our backs, we look elsewhere. Eastern literature is still the poor relative that everyone wants to forget, the Cinderella who hasn't (yet) found her prince.

In so-called communist Romania, chess was held in high esteem, even if our champions were weaker than the Soviets. This game, this "sport of the mind," was at the time a better way to establish your reputation than literature.

Many images of animals, mammals or birds, resurface regularly in my narratives. They are not symbols, but chromatic benchmarks. For me, music has always been the perfect construction - an inaccessible ideal.

Vain Art of the Fugue was the only one of my novels to be met with relative public recognition: it was nominated for the Prix Médicis by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Milan Kundera pocketed the prize instead and the public never clamored to buy it.

At one point I had a very complicated plan to use the game of chess as a generating structure for writing. I prepared for a long time. I finally wrote two chapters and stopped. It was too complicated and too difficult to write. And who would've read it?

We could say that Romanian Onirisme was born from painting and not from surrealist literature. The visual is primordial. Dimov said, 'Dreams are not a source, but a canon, a legislative model.'

For me, literature is the daughter of music: a bit heavy and more level headed than its mother. Literature submits to the same principles of successive perception, which allows it to build progressively.