I think the judging process is full of integrity, compared to some other prizes around the world. The fact that they change the panel of judges every….

Your life must now run the course that's been set for it..

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs..

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it..

All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma..

The book was at a reasonably high position on the New York Times... before I was in the country. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to s….

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds..

What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are havi….

I realised, of course, that other people used these roads; but that night, it seemed to me these dark byways of the country existed just for the like….

You have to accept that sometimes that's how things happen in this world. People's opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just….

All I know is that I've wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I'd get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But….

She always wanted to believe in things..

One need hardly dwell on the catastrophic possibility of uttering a bantering remark only to discover it wholly inappropriate.

I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligi….

I half closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in ….

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood..

I find Japanese books quite baffling when I read them in translation. It's only with Haruki Murakami that I find Japanse fiction that I can understan….

I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way - one solid scene doesn't have to fall on another ….

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on..

It was like being given a maths problem when your brain's exhausted, and you know there's some far-off solution, but you can't work up the energy eve….

Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one's development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one's ability and beyon….