As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
When I got to 40 or so... I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on, and many that I had no control over whatsoever.
I don't really like to work with literary allusions very much. I never want to be in a position where I'm saying, "You've got to read a lot of other stuff" or "You've got to have had a good education in literature to fully appreciate what I'm doing."
The world is crawling with authors touring now. They're like performance artists.
People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.
What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.
Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.
