I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.

Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator's memories and thoughts.

Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?

A man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than the ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions (...) if one has failed only where others have not had the courage or will to try, there is consolation - indeed, deep satisfaction - to be gained from his observation when looking back over one's life. #Page no.134

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there's this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture.

What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.