There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.

Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds.

What he would say, he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.

The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion