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 have no patience with up-themselves authors who complain about having to trail round a few bookshops signing stock.

I was particularly drawn to Berlin because of its literal, concrete division. Two halves making a whole, or two entities that were altered doubles of each other? Twins that had been separated and kept in neighbouring houses and raised according to different sets of rules as a social experiment? It was irresistible as a metaphor for division in the mind, for a split personality.

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.

I'm not trying to write cinematic novels, but I have been told several times that my style is cinematic.

There has been corruption in the Belgian civil service and at government level for decades. The Royal family do what they can to hold things together, and they don't do a bad job.

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