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.

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.

The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names… Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures,...

That’s Anil’s path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.

Miss Lasqueti consumed mostly crime thrillers, which constantly seemed to disappoint her. I suspect that for her the world was more accidental than any book’s plot. Twice I saw her so irritated by a mystery...

But his own mind was helpless against every moment’s headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by...