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.

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.

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

I'm different, and my manner invites questions. I'm never afraid to answer.

Any objective observer will conclude that - based on her ideas and her leadership - Hillary Clinton must become the next president of the United States.

If there is one thing I hope my books do always and forever, its that they honor working people.

Art is a tool by which society extends its perception.

If you don't go to other men's funerals, they won't go to yours.

Oh, the shortcomings and inconsistency of the average human being, especially when this human being is a man trying to manage women's affairs!

You can't improve on saying nothing.

A lot of times in Hollywood you're as good as your last job.

I'd just like to be able to walk without pain or run without a limp.