My mother always says that fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone we're left with the concept, but not the true memory.

No matter how grave the secret, how imperative absolute silence, someone would always feel the urge to confess, and an unleashed secret is a terrible force.

My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996.

A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.

We're all entitled to our superstitions.

Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life – of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.

I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.