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.

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.

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.

What would happen if you gave yourself permission to do somethingyou’ve never done before? There’s only one way to find out.

But sometimes the night reveals the only truth that time passes and things will never be seen the same again.

Provide me with ink and paper and I will write.

After doing a total of five years of Daily Grace, you kind of get burned out on doing the same thing over and over again, so I am allowing myself to not have totally any specific structure.

A final and long-lasting solution to the Kosovo issue cannot be achieved without an agreement with Serbia, especially in regard to the U.N.

The German language is the organ among the languages.

As soon as I get on my boat, something inside me changes. Then I really feel what living is.

No matter how many times you do it, you don't get used to the sadness - for me at least - of coming to the end of a film.

Don't call it uncertainty-call it wonder.

. . . to walk alone in London is the greatest rest.