You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.

I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.

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.

That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.