We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.

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.

Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.

Throughout my career I've struggled to encourage people to read my books on a more metaphorical level. I'm less attached to my settings than, for example, Saul Bellow. The setting of a novel for me is just a part of the technique. I choose it at the end.

You could say I'd rewritten the same novel three times and I thought I had to move on. The success of the book, and then the movie, had by then also created a commercial expectation and I remember touring America and seeing people in the audiences who I thought might not want to read the books I wanted to write next. My constituency had become broader, but more mysterious to me.

What I wished more than anything was that the thing hadn't happened at all, and I thought that by not mentioning it I'd be doing everyone else a favor.

What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.