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.

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.

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.

Get rid of grudges and negativity in your thoughts by replacing them with positive thoughts. You deserve a beautiful life.

When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

Veal! Trust these bloated plutocrats to eat the flesh of poor, newly-born calves!

Sunset in the ethereal waves: I cannot tell if the day is ending, or the world, or if the secret of secrets is inside me again.

You can only possess what you experience. Truth to be understood must be lived.

That which above all other yields the sweetest smell in the air is the violet.

To understand him you had to understand this: he wasn't human.

I don't think you get anything good if you just accept everything the way it rolls out. You have to fight for what you believe in.

I can understand the poor and stupid voting for Marxism or one of its fashionable variants. If you've no hope of being other than a slave, you may as well opt for the most efficient form of slavery.

It is better to have had your wish than to have wish you had.