I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you.Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many...

I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.

When you’re writing, it’s as if you’re within a kind of closed world.

This last night we tear into each other, as if to wound, as if to find the key to everything before morning.

The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.

There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done...

Do you understand the sadness of geography?

It’s a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

…sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.

In the morning she found pieces of a birdchopped and scattered by the fanblood sprayed onto the mosquito net,its body leaving paths on the wallslike red snails that drifted down in lumps.She could imagine the...

You don’t want to write your own opinion, you don’t want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.

The trouble with words is that you can really talk yourself into a corner. You can’t fuck yourself into a corner.”That’s a man talking,” muttered Hana.

I don’t see novels ending with any real sense of closure.

Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like...

Around three a.m. he feels a presence in the room. He sees, for the pulse of a moment, a figure at the foot of his bed, against the wall or painted onto it perhaps, not...

It’s an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.

But the young sapper was already on his back, the rifle aimed, his eye almost brushing the beards of Noah and Abraham and the variety of demons until he reached the great face and was...

Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not...

A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.

She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic...

Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.

It’s why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have...

Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.

You’re getting everyone’s point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.

Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and...

We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.

Once I’ve discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as...

There was a time when I could have slept with his friend Briffa, for instance. Around him the air was always fraught with possibilities.

I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in...

I don’t have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears...

How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of...

Research can be a big clunker. It’s difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he’s with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.

In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and...

I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.

A blind lover, don’t knowwhat I love till I write it out

…how many of us have a moved heart that shies away to a different angle, a millimetre or even less from the place where it first existed, some repositioning unknown to us.

Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.

Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up...

He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not...

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.