You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?

I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not.

Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.

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

I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.

All I know is that I've wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I'd get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don't want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow's sky. That's what I want now, and I think it's what you should want too. But it will be too late soon. We'll become too set to change. If we don't take our chance now, another may never come for either of us.

What interests me is the surprising enormous extent to which most people accept the fate that's been given to them, and find some dignity.