The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.

The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.

I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.

Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?

War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.

Music, love, death. Certainly a triangle of sorts; maybe even an eternal one. "The only people who can see the whole picture," he murmured, "are the ones who step out of the frame."

The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.