It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.

If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.

she had a laugh that hinted it had rolled around once or twice in the mud.

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.