I always have lots of zany ideas for promotional stuff as publication nears.

Belgium is a country with a split personality.

I'm not trying to write cinematic novels, but I have been told several times that my style is cinematic.

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.

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.

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 have no patience with up-themselves authors who complain about having to trail round a few bookshops signing stock.

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 short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.

I am interested in power and in the idea of one country exerting power over another. The Soviets took this to an extreme.

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.

It's not courage so much as stubbornness, " Alice said frankly. Her lips curled back from her teeth in a grim smile. "I don't like to lose.

Limiting beliefs are a virus of the mind. They decline your success and happiness.

I've come to a view that humans will continue to do what we do well, and that computers will continue to do what they do very well, and the two will coexist, but in different spaces.

We learn most readily, most naturally, most effectively, when we start with the big picture - precisely when the basics don't come first.

We cannot live without our lives

Dear God, woman,"said Will. "Are there any questions you don't want to know the answer to?

I place a lot of emphasis on process and revision because I believe that all of my students can become better writers through hard work.

The plainest man who pays attention to women, will sometimes succeed as well as the handsomest man who does not.

For the eight years I was president I never let my dream of a nuclear-free world fade from my mind.

The pursuit of knowledge is but a course between two ignorances, as human life is itself only a wayfaring from grave to grave.