People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

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.

The problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.

People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

Every country should have a strong literary tradition of its own at the center, but it should also have an interest in other countries.