We keep wanting to save those who are forlorn in this world. It’s a male habit.

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.

In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.

... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.

Snap. Lady with dog. Lady on sofa half-naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)

When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.