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.

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

I find Japanese books quite baffling when I read them in translation. It's only with Haruki Murakami that I find Japanse fiction that I can understand and relate to. He's a very international writer.

I actually dislike, more than many people, working through literary allusion. I just feel that there's something a bit snobbish or elitist about that. I don't like it as a reader, when I'm reading something. It's not just the elitism of it; it jolts me out of the mode in which I'm reading. I've immersed myself in the world and then when the light goes on I'm supposed to be making some kind of literary comparison to another text. I find I'm pulled out of my kind of fictional world, I'm asked to use my brain in a different kind of way. I don't like that.

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.

As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.