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

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.

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

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.

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.

To be a highflier and a name to conjure with, you must decide your dimension, plan your path, master the moment, focus on the future, determine your degree, push your persistence and leadyour life.

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.

So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook?Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.

Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.

Fewer things are lovelier to me than a full-blown rose when it opens up its heart.

If you have a vision, no matter how difficult things are, everything just becomes a process.

The experience of every past moment but belies the faith of each present.

So far from science being irreligious, as many think, it is the neglect of science that is irreligious-it is the refusal to study the surrounding creation that is irreligious.

Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon. I found it one of the hardest things to learn. But it is only after a stock operator has firmly grasped this that he can make big money.

If the [Republican] party wants to have an ideological debate, it's never going to win anything in a major way.