Politically I also don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country. You want the politics of any complicated situation to be complicated in a book of fiction or nonfiction.

I kind of was shoveled onto a boat at 11 and went to England. I didn't have any parent watching over me. It was very free and may have been a bit of a scary time for me, but I really don't remember much about the voyage apart from playing ping-pong a lot with a couple friends.

The desert could not be claimed or owned — it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East ... All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.

He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?

People don't write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.

Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.

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