I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial -- or is it post-colonial? -- cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it -- assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.

You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.

The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.

I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.

The point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire... Now that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains is ordinary human life.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.