To grow up is to wonder about things; to be grown up is to slowly forget the things you wondered about as a child.

I know paradise has many gates, just as hell does. One has to learn to distinguish between them, or one is lost.

He was so excessively polite that Wallendar suspected he had endured many humiliations in his life.

As a writer, I am an intellectual. I believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment, I believe in the written word, in dialogue and in truth. I hate lies more than anything else. Most of the time I react by writing.

I came to Mozambique in 1986, when I first became involved with Teatro Avenida - a theatre company that stages plays concerned with political and social issues.

Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in 'Oliver Twist' that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as if he was sent to this earth with the sole purpose of writing this book.

Africa was the most exotic place I could conceive of - the end of the world - and I knew I would go there one day.