Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Belgium is a country with a split personality.
I always have lots of zany ideas for promotional stuff as publication nears.
I've written over 100 short stories. You could say I'm obsessed with short stories.
I'm not trying to write cinematic novels, but I have been told several times that my style is cinematic.
I love experimental writing, when it's good, and good examples are much more likely to be found in the short form.
I have no patience with up-themselves authors who complain about having to trail round a few bookshops signing stock.
I am interested in power and in the idea of one country exerting power over another. The Soviets took this to an extreme.
The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.
What the short story needs above all is for one of the big publishers to get an equivalent series up and running and to support it and promote it.
The Belgians tend to downplay the cultural divide issue, and the far-right issue, but there's a staggering degree of casual racism in Belgium, much worse than in the UK.
There has been corruption in the Belgian civil service and at government level for decades. The Royal family do what they can to hold things together, and they don't do a bad job.
The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.
I never know exactly where I'm going with a story, whether it's a short story or a novel. If I did I'd soon grow bored of it. The fun, for me, is in the finding out and the making sense of it.
I only like naturalistic stories. I love short, fantastic stories that cast a spell over the reader, that transport you instantly to another place with another set of rules, somewhere imagined by someone else.
Who was it recently invented some machine that will enable her to sign a book from 5,000 miles away? Margaret Atwood. Get off your arse, love, and sign it in person. Publishers and circumstance made you a bestselling author. Give a little back.
Increasingly, those who used to teach and write critical or theoretical texts are writing fiction, poetry and so on; and kinds of texts are being produced that call for budding readers rather different from those who studied literature in the past.
I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.
I was particularly drawn to Berlin because of its literal, concrete division. Two halves making a whole, or two entities that were altered doubles of each other? Twins that had been separated and kept in neighbouring houses and raised according to different sets of rules as a social experiment? It was irresistible as a metaphor for division in the mind, for a split personality.