And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later.

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

I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.

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.

If you were a boy and a girl and you were in love with each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it, then the people who run Hailsham, they sorted it out for you. They sorted it out so you could have a few years together before you began your donations.

But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.

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