It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book.

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

I was always influenced by language.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.