Belgium is a country with a split personality.

The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.

I love experimental writing, when it's good, and good examples are much more likely to be found in the short form.

I only like naturalistic stories. I love short, fantastic stories that cast a spell over the reader, that transport you instantly to another place with another set of rules, somewhere imagined by someone else.

I am interested in power and in the idea of one country exerting power over another. The Soviets took this to an extreme.

What the short story needs above all is for one of the big publishers to get an equivalent series up and running and to support it and promote it.

I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.