I've written over 100 short stories. You could say I'm obsessed with short stories.

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 will never lie again.

Dennis was present, still present, and this, she thought as she stayed landed against him, was no small talent.

I delight sometimes in saying to - as when I'm a teacher, I love saying, 'This is really important, so don't write it down.' To me, what you retain is a very important filter.

Life is worth being lived, but not being discussed all the time.

I knew Ginny was lying about that tattoo.

The metal of economic theory is in Marx's pages immersed in such a wealth of steaming phrases as to acquire a temperature not naturally its own.

I went through bits of the 60s and thought myself a bit of a hippy.

I cannot be other than what I am, and I am the choices of all my days.

Film is a collection of many mediums and collaboration and you're only as strong as the people you're working with - and everybody owns their mediums.

Theres nothing better than keeping fit. It gives me energy and helps me think more clearly.