The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.

So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.

I promised to tell you how one falls in love.

The rulers of the country generally believed that betting eliminates strikes. Men had to work in order to gamble.

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.

He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.

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.