I can see,’ Miss Emily said, ‘that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns. There was a certain climate and now it’s gone. You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in the world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.’ ‘It might be just some trend that came and went,’ I said. ‘But for us, it’s our life.

There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

To see the best before I have properly begun would be somewhat premature.

I think it's quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.

I don't have a deep link with England like, say, Jonathan Coe or Hanif Kureishi might demonstrate. For me it is like a mythical place.

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