I think the judging process is full of integrity, compared to some other prizes around the world. The fact that they change the panel of judges every year keeps it from becoming corrupt. I think it's very difficult if you've got judges for life; obviously relationships are cultivated between judges and authors, and publishing houses.

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you're going to write before you die.

Even the solitude, I've actually grown to quite like... I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I'll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.

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

There's still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I'm not trying to say I'm not happy with the novels I've written in the past. But it always feels to me like there's another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.

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

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.