One has to choose a word in English. If you want to be eligible for a literary prize you have to designate it as something.

Writers feel that they can't afford to wait. They must do it now, and they are so clever, and there is so much competition. I'm quite happy to wait, and quite confident that the muses will cross the stream.

[Anton] Chekhov is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and most of the people in my sort of audience would have seen at least one of his plays.

I think that in this globalised world, the local is going to become more and more important - it is a paradox. You see it in Western Europe more and more. Eastern Europe is still coming out of the Soviet uniform cultural era, but this kind of separation and nationalism is very obvious now in Western Europe.

I want to write the sort the book that my people want to read, even if the market is small.

Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.

One of the unfortunate things about creative writing courses is that they make people impatient. People feel that they have prepared themselves and that they must now do it. In fact there are positive incentives for doing so - universities are offering degrees for writing novels.