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.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

I want my words to survive translation.

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.

It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.

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.

If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there's this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture.